DEBBIE KILROY:
her inspiring journey from criminal to lawyer
When the great American civil rights activist, Professor Angela Davis, arrived in Brisbane in 2001 for her first visit to Australia, she wondered what she had gotten herself into. There, waiting at the airport, was a “fast-talking white woman with blonde hair who drove a black pick-up truck. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”
Angela had been invited to meet Sisters Inside, an advocacy group for women prisoners founded by the aforementioned blonde powerhouse, Debbie Kilroy. “There was something about the email she sent me,” Angela recalls. “Debbie is one of the most remarkable people I have met on this planet.”
Angela is not the only person of note who has been bowled over by Debbie Kilroy. She’s now a lawyer and a powerful advocate for women in prison, but Debbie’s life could have played out very differently.
When Debbie arrived at Brisbane’s Banco Court to be admitted as a lawyer in 2007, she was accompanied by supporters who were well acquainted with the legal system – and not in a good way. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Debbie would actually be admitted to the bar – it could have gone either way. She was shown a seat at the back so she could slink out if she was not deemed a “fit and proper person” to practise law. Although the voluminous file on the table contained plenty of evidence to the contrary.
“I was quite concerned,” says Keith Hamburger, former Director-General, Queensland Corrective Services Commission. “There must have been somewhere around 20 former prisoners sitting in front of me. It was a very formal place. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what are these women going to do if she gets knocked back?’ I was dreading what would happen.”
Even one of Debbie’s best friends, a barrister, had told her not to bother with all the study for a law degree because she would never be admitted.
Then-Chief Justice Paul de Jersey said he had never seen a case like hers. As he spoke of her serious criminal history the tension built. And then he looked at the two judges on either side of him and said, “We have decided unanimously that you will be admitted.” And the court erupted into screaming and cheers that the porter had some difficulty controlling.
On that day, Debbie Kilroy completed one of the greatest reversals in Australian legal history: she was the first person in Australia with serious convictions to be admitted by the Supreme Court of Queensland to practice law. Hers was a life remade. From teenage tearaway in juvenile detention to battered girlfriend, to adult in prison for drug trafficking to
formidable human rights activist, to influential and powerful public figure and recipient of the Order of Australia.
“She is a force of nature, she really is,” says her friend and biographer, Kristina Olsson.
Debbie shrugs now at how devastating it would have been to be turned away that day. “It would have been just another fight,” she says.
Debbie Kilroy has been fighting all her life – kicking against the system, fighting injustice.
“I imagine I’m fighting, kicking and screaming in all the advocacy and activism that I do. But as a kid in juvenile detention I used to kick and scream when they locked me in a cell. I would just kick, kick, kick the door. I would do it to a rhythm. They would hold me down and give me injections but I would just fight it. I wouldn’t let them break me.”
We meet in the shabby, slightly chaotic Brisbane office of Sisters Inside, the community organisation she founded in 1992 to advocate for and support women in the prison system, and the office of her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan. There are prams, soft toys and boxes of donated books for women in prison, and a long table covered in papers. Wearing discreet diamonds, Debbie looks glamorous but tired. She has just come from visiting prison.
“I think she literally works 18 hours a day,” says Kristina. “She is synonymous with getting women out of prisons and keeping them out, and she just doesn’t stop. But if somebody gets sick and they are in hospital she will be there all the time. She was there at my father’s funeral, she was there when one of my grandchildren was born – she was the first one there to hold them. I have no idea how she does it but she does. She has this enormous room in her for things she cares about. She can be tough but when she is, it is for the right reasons. She is just authentic.”
Her work, though, is never ending – sadness that never stops. Women’s prisons are overcrowded with the marginalised and disadvantaged.
“We know,” she says, “that the issues that present for women in prison are about poverty and homelessness. Prison is the default response for poverty, homelessness, mental health problems, drug addiction, abused women. Eighty-six per cent of women [in prison] have been sexually assaulted. We know that many women in prison can’t even read or write. The incarceration of Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal women has increased 640 per cent in the last 20 years, and they are the ones who are the most brutalised.”
Later I will see the passion, the burning sense of injustice and outrage, that fuels Debbie at a session at the Women in the World conference – and her robust, mischievous humour.
“You’ve actually got to keep women out of prison, otherwise the prison industry just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger,” she says, along with a few ripe swear words.
Furious at the world
Debbie Kilroy grew up in Kedron, Brisbane, in a suburban home with an above-ground swimming pool and a neat garden. Her father, Kevin, was a bricklaying contractor; her mother, Pat, was devoted to her family. But by her early teens Debbie was delinquent, constantly wagging school, mouthy, belligerent, uncontrollable, disappearing every weekend while her parents frantically searched for her, in rebellion against any kind of authority: school, church, family.
From an early age, Kristina writes in her book Kilroy Was Here, she seemed “possessed by some furious anger at the world.” At high school she started hanging out with the Aboriginal kids. “She was really attracted to the other side,” says Kris. “People who were on the wild side – she identified with them. She hadn’t suffered any disadvantage but she saw that inequality really early and that was the side she wanted to be on.”
It was when she was picked up by police in a stolen car, 800 kilometres from home at the age of 14, that her bewildered parents were persuaded to sign her into Wilson Youth Hostel for a month-long psychiatric assessment.
“Dad was convinced by the professionals because my family was working class,” she says now, of her father relinquishing control of his daughter to the state. And that is when the trouble really started, where the teen rebel was criminalised. “Until I hit that youth prison I had never experienced violence. I had never seen my mother and father fighting ever in my life.”
“Until I hit that youth prison I had never experienced violence.”
It was a brutal place, and the start of years in and out of juvie. In 1975, when she was told her father had died of a heart attack, the matron said she had driven him to an early death, words that would haunt her for years. Believing herself a bad person, she became a violent offender, living in a criminal culture, “a revolving door of crime, violence, punishment,” writes Kris. When she was out, Debbie admits, “Yeah, we would break into houses and steal things, looking for food, looking for money to feed ourselves.”
By 15 she was in a relationship with a troubled young Aboriginal boy, which was characterised by sudden unpredictable violence, bruises, black eyes, split lips and broken bones.
By 17 she was pregnant with her daughter, Jody. There were years of drinking, partying, fighting. But she also became a gym teacher.
Then she met Joe Kilroy, the talented fullback, whose mother had been a Batchula woman. “He was a kid in an orphanage and I was a kid in and out of prison,” she says. “She was the hardest woman in the world to love in those days,” Joe told Kris, “a real pain in the arse with a gut full of vodka.” It was a combustible relationship, but they married in 1986 when she was four months pregnant with their son, Joshua. The wedding of the handsome Brisbane Broncos star and the pretty blonde was noted by The Sunday Mail. They’ve remained married to this day. In July 1988, both Debbie and Joe were charged with trafficking, supplying and possession of dangerous drugs. They had smoked cannabis and sold it to cover their expenses. Under the then Drugs Misuse Act they faced life sentences.
Debbie learnt what it is like to be torn away from your children and the devastating affect it has on them. “I had to make plans for going in for life. I sold my home. My daughter went to my mum and Joshua went to my grandmother. It does rip you apart.”
Jody was 11 when both her parents went to prison. She was taunted at school, and was later dubbed “Australia’s greatest con woman” for her audacious cons of both men and women across the country, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Jody was sentenced to prison in 2006, Judge Felicity Hampel said: “You were denied in your childhood the safety and stability which family life should provide children.”
Jody’s mother would go on to work tirelessly with children whose mothers are in prison, running programs with Sisters Inside. “She was a kid,” says Debbie now, “at a very vulnerable age to lose your parents. Her life took a turn for the worse because of brutalisation that happened to her while we were in prison. That’s a heartache we have to live with.” But, Debbie adds, “she went to uni, she is 40 now, life is good.”
Says Kris: “Debbie has looked out for the children of women in prison, who are usually the primary caregivers. From the time they were babies she stayed really close to these young women and made sure they didn’t go to prison, making sure the maternal bond isn’t broken. She has done that in her own time, with her own energy and love. ”
“When you send a woman to prison,” says Debbie, “you are also sending her children. They become victims,
targeted and traumatised because of their mothers’ imprisonment. What I say to children all the time is: ‘Don’t let your mother’s imprisonment define who you are. Let’s create your own journey and who you want to be’.”
For her own trial, Debbie plea bargained and was sentenced to six years in the notorious Boggo Road Goal. She ended up doing two and a half years, getting early parole.
Now, if she knows her clients are going to get a long sentence, she talks to them in the dock.
“Because from my experience you’re not in your body, you are watching down from above in a state of suspense. I remember, when we were sentenced, my husband went to touch my hand and I was like ‘don’t even f***ing touch me’. I was putting massive armour up because I knew I had to.”
In that volatile prison, her close friend Debbie Dick was stabbed to death with a sharpened barbecue fork. Sitting next to her, Debbie was wounded when she tried to intervene. The management was sacked and Keith Hamburger came in as GM, determined to work with the women, setting up committees and listening to ideas and grievances. “I was very impressed by Debbie – that was a tragic and awful situation but she provided very good leadership for the other prisoners,” says Hamburger. “She is a courageous woman and speaks her mind.”
A new beginning
Debbie decided to use the system to her advantage and get an education, “because I had dropped out of school in Year Eight. I hated school. That was why I got locked up.” She started a social work degree. “I did social work because it was social workers who convinced my father to lock me up, which was the slippery slope for disaster and trauma. I thought, ‘I actually want that bit of paper that gives you so much power to remove children and how dare you?’” Later she studied law to “use that power and absolute privilege to assist women going through the courts.” Along the way, she also earned a Diploma in Forensic Mental Health.
Debbie is now almost certainly the only person on the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council who advocates abolishing prisons. Instead of overcrowding, she believes we need to change the issues that cause women to be in prison.
“Prisons are very violent institutions and they don’t serve their purpose. They are a failure,” she says. Much of the prison population is made up of “people who are living in poverty and are disadvantaged, marginalised, homeless, who have mental illness, or are drug addicted.” The issues that are leading them towards prison would be better dealt with in the community, she insists.
“The majority of women who end up in prison are impoverished – that is the reality,” Debbie says. “Governments have made it worse because of the evisceration of all the services in the community. Newstart hasn’t increased
“Prisons are very violent institutions and they don’t serve their purpose.”
substantially in 20 years, and you can’t rent a house on $260 a week. So for those in poverty, it is just a merry-goround in and out of prison.
“The deinstitutionalisation of the mental health system and scarcity of mental health services means many of those women are homeless, and if you are homeless and have mental illness, you collide with the cops very quickly and get criminalised.”
Moreover, Debbie says, 20 per cent of women in prison in Queensland are victims of domestic violence, often imprisoned for breaches to an order that were unavoidable or unintentional. “Some of these women,” she says, “don’t even have a criminal history and would never get sentenced to imprisonment but are languishing on remand for months.”
Debbie will not ignore these women. Debbie the lawyer with the pick-up truck, the colourful language, the extraordinary backstory and influential friends. Debbie the avenging angel, the woman who has never forgotten her sisters inside. Her goal, in the longterm, is to revolutionise the system, putting justice for women front and centre. But in the short term, she says: “One by one ... if we can keep women out of prison, one by one, that makes a huge difference.”