Name: Susan*
Age: 47
Current conviction:
Breach of Parole
1 count: Break and Enter house etc steal value <= $60,000
1 count: Goods in personal custody suspected of being stolen
Sentence: 1 year
Non-parole period: 3 months
As a teenager, Susan says she dreamed of writing, fashion design, and travel, but after leaving school in Year 10 pursued secretarial work in the public service. A few years later, she says she moved to the city and took up other jobs, starting to save for travel.
“If my life was [that] I went to India and didn't pursue that relationship, then things would have been really different,” she says, speaking with Insight’s Jenny Brockie. Her short blonde hair frames a soft face and she wears the prison uniform’s standard dark green tracksuit in her interview. When she first sat down to speak with Insight, as part of the program’s , she was due for release. She is now back at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre after breaching her parole.
In her mid-20s, Susan began drinking, frequently; a habit she claims was connected to a new relationship. “It only started off quite small, you know, like the little flasks and that I'd buy,” she says. “Whereas now, I go through nearly a litre or two litres … a day. Vodka mainly.”
“My body just needed that alcohol.”
The last job she held was in 2000.
“How much time have you spent in and out of jail since 2000?” asks Brockie.
“I've been every year and for, you know, long periods, short periods of time mainly, for the last sixteen years,” she says.
It was for dishonesty charges mainly, she says: larceny, drink driving, break and enter.
“It's the criminal behaviour that goes hand in hand with addiction, you know?” she tells Insight. “It’s the addiction behind that crime … get money for your addiction.”
Her relationships, too, “all had their addiction problems, I guess, with either with gambling, heroin addiction or alcoholism as well.”
Susan, speaking with Insight Source: Insight
“Why do you think you're attracted to those sort of men?” asks Brockie.
“Because of my, I guess my addiction, maybe even, even psychologically it's just like automatic that I attract those men into my life.”
A recent break and enter has brought her to Silverwater, by way of an existing ‘E’ classification – assigned to her after an attempted escape in 2008 from a minimum security prison 40 minutes away.
“I was homeless and went into a house for the purpose of just getting a blanket to be able to sleep somewhere because it was winter and I was intoxicated,” she says.
“But you didn't just steal a blanket. You stole a purse, you stole mobile phones?” challenges Brockie.
“I guess I was in hurry and was so desperate for mainly the blanket, like that was my purpose for going in there, not to steal other stuff, they were just on the, on the doona,” says Susan. Police later found more stolen goods in her possession.
Jail's like my home ... I don't want that to be the rest of my life.
“For the last sixteen years of my life I've been coming in and out of jail and getting out, going to rehabs and just making the wrong decisions and then I end up back in custody,” she says.
She admits that her times in prison and their associated sobriety “have saved my life,” but she has so far been unable to complete a rehab program to get past the addiction.
“Why do I keep going back to the drinking when I know where it's going to put me?" she says. "It's going to bring me back in here or it will end up killing me.”
"Jail's like my home ... I don't want that to be the rest of my life."
Hear Susan's full story on - Insight's two-part special inside a women's maximum security prison. Catch up on both episodes below:
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*Name has been changed
