When producer Johanna Bell first met the female prisoners at Darwin Correctional Centre, she rallied them for a moment of self-reflection.
“What do you people think of you on the outside?” she quizzed the cohort of 80 inmates, hoping to glean a sense of their self-worth. But she wasn’t quite prepared for what came next.
“Low-life. Scum. Delinquent. Vermin,” the women rattled off, in a seemingly endless inventory of taunts. And finally: “That we deserve to be here.”
This nefarious self-assessment troubled Bell, but it didn’t surprise her. “I’ve seen for many years the oversimplified narrative of female prisoners being bad, broken and empty, but it doesn’t measure up,” she said. “Instead I saw women who were smart and funny, they were survivors. We decided as a group to make an audio podcast to challenge this harmful stereotype.”
For the next two years, Johanna Bell was privy to a sub-set of society few will ever encounter: the daily life of female prisoners at the Darwin Correctional Facility—a minimum to maximum security prison with a capacity for up to 968 men and just 80 women.
Released in March 2020, Bird’s Eye View is the world’s first podcast to be co-produced by female inmates. Combining storytelling, poetry, satire and music, the ‘magazine’ style podcast oscillates between beauty hacks, horoscopes, celebrity interviews, love-letters prison bird-watching, jail tours, and crime confessionals.
“It’s like a variety show,” says Bell, who collaborated with 18 inmates to tell their stories over the first season’s ten episodes. “One moment, the women are reflecting on their crime, the next they are walking you over to industries where the prisoners clean Qantas headsets or into the bathroom on razer issue day. Then they are talking about how to survive 5 years in jail with no sex.”
But beyond its comedic spoils, there is a greater purpose at play. The Northern Territory government partly funded the podcast as one of a number of public initiatives designed to reduce the risk of alcohol and drug-related harm for women in prison and their communities.
There were three target groups for outcomes: the women involved who benefited through deep listening, reflective storytelling, confidence building, and skills development, their families and communities who may think, feel and act differently as a result of hearing the stories and the broader community who have a better understanding of the lived experiences of women in prison.
And with her academic background in social impact and research, Bell took to the task with the utmost care and preparedness. As part of her research, she traveled to the US on a Churchill Fellowship to explore the various approaches to community storytelling within the prison system.
“I saw a number of parallels between what’s happening in the US and the Territory,” she told The Quo. “Particularly around the over-representation of Indigenous prisoners and the disruption that occurs when there are race-based issues at play in the policing and justice system.”
The Northern Territory, and indeed Australia at large, faces a number of socio-political challenges with regard to female and Indigenous incarceration. Studies show that between 70-90% of female prisoners in Australia are victims of abuse, and the majority have committed minor nonviolent offenses.
Furthermore, Indigenous women are the fastest-growing cohort of prisoners in Australia and are even more likely than non-Indigenous women to be imprisoned for minor offenses—a statistic that rings true at Darwin Correctional Centre, where 80% of the women are Indigenous.
But it’s one thing to read these statistics in the news, and another to hear them from an individual who’s lived to tell the tale. And this is where Bird’s Eye View succeeds so brilliantly, in humanising the prisoners, in demonstrating that they are more than just a number.
Like Rocket, who grew up in an abusive environment and went onto spend the majority of her adult life in prison. “Up until recently she thought she would come out and get on the drugs,” says Bell. “But storytelling had a profound impact on her recovery.”
According to Bell, Rocket has been out of prison now for 12 months, and is drug-free. She looks after her god daughter and is making steps to become an advocate for women in incarceration.
“It’s been very validating for Rocket, and for all the other women involved, to have their stories heard and received so positively,” Bell says. “I really hope that people who listen are reminded of the complexity of peoples’ lives. Our mistakes don’t define us. We can hear a little bit of ourselves in all these stories.”