The Forest

Imagine the most scariest moment you've had in your life and your paranoia has been activated. I'm six-foot tall, I'm very strong, I hold my ground in prison, but walk outside, I end up sleeping on the park bench. Now imagine living like that, from the day that you leave prison.

Once I get out, they'll say, ah, I wish I was back in jail. A lot of them commit crime just to go back to prison.

It was structure, it was meals fed, it was easy.

I started thinking about having to do the right thing about getting out, was like, when you're standing up on a 20-storey building, you look over the edge, and you get those butterflies in your tummy. It was a very scary feeling.

I didn't spend too long in prison. But I spent long enough to know that I don't want to be in prison. I came from a background of a lot of disadvantage and trauma. Yeah, like it's not a place that anyone should be going to.

What we're seeing at the moment in Australia is an incredible growth in the size of the incarcerated population. And that's in response to a range of 'tough on crime' policy implementations over the last decade or so. People who use drugs, particularly those who inject drugs, are incredibly over-represented in prison populations. Not only those in prison, but those that are re-incarcerated time and time again. The problem with the current system is it's incredibly fractured. We know that people who are incarcerated have a really complex array of social and health needs, and they're each serviced by different areas of government, and it's incredibly difficult for somebody to negotiate.

How do I know what to ask? How do I know what to do when a lot of people just need that information given to them? I lost the ability to actually speak to your average person. That's the doorway, what I remember of going back to using drugs.

That type of the system and the requirements to adhere to the types of programmes that are often part of community corrections orders, is incredibly difficult to comply with. What is needed is a more holistic, person-centred approach to dealing with this problem.

Part of our starting point was thinking about things that already existed in the sector for people leaving prison, or people with histories of drug use, who might not have that prison experience.

And of course, there are things out in the sector that do work and that are welcoming and are supportive of people. But they're often under-resourced, or have particular eligibility criteria, or only located in particular areas.
Society can look very cold and very selfish to someone coming out of prison.

So they're coming into a society that already outcasts people.

Dealing with that stuff, just fitting in is a really big thing.

We really wanted to collaborate with people who had experiences of coming out of prison back into the community and really get them involved in thinking about what has worked for them, what could work for them, what could work if there was more of it, and it was more accessible. Rather than us looking at data and deciding what the solutions should be, we wanted them to be really involved in building something that they thought could make a difference.

We were free to be able to explore and express what we felt was best. Like it's a really nice feeling to know that I was part of it, and to help people to start healing is to start growing and start seeing some purpose in their own life.

What emerged from the code design process is a real understanding of the various trajectories people take out of prison, and the different needs that they have at different points of time.

To go through the experience of being in a co-design group, it's a whole new learning experience that just starts from one little idea, raises a ripple effect and just keeps going.

They're coming in feeling comfortable, just to drop in and say hello, have something to eat, to help them with housing, to help them with the doctors, to help them with Centrelink.

It's not just a place for people to go, it's actually also things that people can do that are meaningful.

They're also looking at as a place that's offering education, training, we're looking at it as a social connection kind of place where people can hang out and see what the world has to actually offer.

Some of the low-threshold, easily accessible activities that might help them to build some capability, build some confidence, build a sense of maybe just enjoyment and fun.

We have a singular governance structure that sort of covers a whole range of those services so they can be facilitated and delivered to the person as opposed to the person trying to negotiate access to those services as to why it's going to be different this time.

A lot can happen in six months, a lot can happen in 24 hours, a lot can happen in one hour, especially when we're talking about people who are using substances. Having waitlists is literally a matter of life and death for a lot of people, so a lot of the time, you got to kind of like tap into having things accessible when somebody has that readiness in the moment that they have that readiness.

Giving them a safe space to move into a paid employment role, or a voluntary role, or a mentorship role. So thinking about all the different pathways that might cater to the diversity of experiences that people have, and the different sorts of needs that they might have.

Yeah, I've managed to fit back into society. But the one thing that I do owe that to is actually some people that were in prison and did serve as a bit of a role model during my early days in recovery.

What we want to do is shorten the time that it might take for people to get to a point in their lives, where they're in a space where they can make some different decisions, where there can be a different path that they might follow than the one that they're so used to.

A program like this is desperately needed to sort of break that cycle. If we invested just a fraction of the money that goes into prisons into supporting strong prison-to-community post-release programs, and strong programs to help facilitate people back into the community, then that's going to go a long way to reducing the size of the prison population, which will have enormous economic benefits, but incredible social benefits as well.

The concept that I keep coming back to that has emerged through this co-design process, is that word, being able to dream.

You know, I never expected where my life is today, five years later, to be the way that it is, so oh my gosh, I can actually laugh.

This project has shown us that if we're all working towards the same goal, and it's something that we believe in, that those barriers come down, and those boundaries shift. And I think we really showed in the way that we came out this project and the way that we collaborated together that that was indeed possible, and we could transcend those seemingly professional boundaries in a way that could create something that was for whole people and whole communities.

Change is always possible. It's just a matter of being able to provide the right resources and support and opportunities to change and see something better for themselves and create a new way of living.