BY KERRY VERNON
BRISBANE — Renowned US activist Angela Davis joined dozens of activists, solicitors and researchers working inside and outside prison who gathered here from November 28-30 to discuss the impact of imprisonment on women.
Famous for being framed on murder and conspiracy charges in the 1960s when a young civil rights campaigner, Davis, based in California, has done ground-breaking work on the connections between race, gender, class and the prison culture in the United States, as well as research on the exploitation of prison labour by corporations.
Other international speakers at the conference included Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, and Jean Trounstine, who runs a "Shakespeare behind Bars" program from Boston.
They were joined by a wide range of Australian-based speakers including Queensland chief magistrate Di Fingelton, anti-discrimination commissioner Karen Walters, feminist criminologists Suzanne Davis and Sandy Cook and the Prisoners Legal Service's Karen Fletcher.
Discussions at the conference, organised by the independent community group Sisters Inside, which advocates for the human rights of women in the criminal justice system, ranged over how strip-searching aggravates the effects of sexual assault, why women die after release, Aboriginal women's experience of prison, drugs and violence and prison privatisation.
According to Sisters Inside director Debbie Kilroy, the numbers of women in prison in Queensland have tripled in the past five years from under 100 to 350.
From Green Left Weekly, December 5, 2001.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.