JOURNEY HOME A BEACON OF HOPE
FOR young women trapped in intergenerational habits, going to jail can sadly mean returning to a familiar environment, and spending more time with their mothers or aunties.
Bindal Sharks CEO Jenny Pryor started the My Journey Home prison program four years ago, aiming to break the cycle for indigenous women offenders.
“A lot of them had no life skills whatsoever; ( they didn’t know) how to live in this environment but also how to go back outside and be a valuable person to their family and to their extended family and the community that they came from,” she said.
Ms Pryor said a lot of the inmates she had spoken to had been “carrying baggage” from as young as five years old.
“Here you can see a couple of generations of hereditary behaviour – daughters, mothers, grandmothers have actually come through the system. It’s the only system that they feel safe in probably,” she said. “You find that a lot of them say in the course that they’ve found no support on the outside, actually prison life has actually saved them.
“While in here, they’ve been able to reassess.”
The My Journey Home program is now an accredited program and a requirement for some seeking parole.
Ms Pryor said in the spirit of true reconciliation, My Journey Home was now offered to men and women of all races.
“If you want the whole family to reunite and start working as a family, you have to deal with both man and woman and they have to take responsibility,” she said.
In the past two years, the program has been delivered to 167 women and 147 men.
“From our feedback, officers see a change in them. Their attitudes have changed, they’re actually taking responsibility,” she said.
Ms Pryor said what Townsville desperately needed was a transition house for newly released prisoners.
“When they do get out, there’s very limited choices of where they can go, and when they do get out, if things are too tough, they’ll reoffend and come back in because it’s the only structure that they know,” she said.