ABSTRACT
While it is all too easy to criticise the way in which prisons respond (or do not respond) to the needs of cognitively disabled women, this is not a completely fair assessment, because it fails to recognise the committed and knowledgeable practitioners who work in an environment that is not always conducive to change. Australian prisons are embedded in white, middle-class, predominantly male values, premised on the maintenance of those values via the use and over-use of the CJS. In a mostly punitive system, women who are disadvantaged, traumatised, Indigenous, mentally ill, substance affected, homeless, and cognitively disabled, have little chance of emerging unscathed. As prison practitioners emphasise, the frustration lies in the fact that it is a system ‘on repeat’, whereby these conditions continue to be punished, with prison exacerbating pre-existing and complex problems. Ironically, prison provided a few women in this study with that which had been denied them outside its walls – food, shelter, some sort of healthcare, occasional access to education or jobs, and a sense of being part of a ‘sisterhood’ or ‘community’. However, practitioner narratives overwhelmingly focused on the lack of resources for cognitively disabled women, particularly in the crucial area of adaptive skills.
