On the evening of 6 February 1982 a fire was lit by women prisoners in the remand section of the HM Fairlea Womenâs Prison , Victoriaâs main prison for women located in the Melbourne suburb of Fairfield. The fire caused the deaths of three women who were being held on remand at the time, Clelia Vigano , Mary Catilo and Danielle Wright , and destroyed a large section of the prison. Two other imprisoned women were hospitalised and sustained serious injuries. On the day of the fire there were 53 women, three babies and five staff on duty within the prison (Mason 1982, 8 June, 9). At the time, Fairlea Prison was understaffed and an industrial dispute was brewing (Mason 1982, 8 June, 58â59). A sense of unrest had been building among the imprisoned women, as one woman, JM, told the Coroner: âThere were hassles and pressure building up in the gaol, it was blowing upâ (Mason 1982, 22 September, 399).
In the afternoon, just hours before the fire was lit, four women escaped the prison . It was alleged that Danielle Wright assisted the escapees to disappear through the laundry section of the prison. However, shortly thereafter, they were apprehended and returned to the punishment cellblocks of Fairlea Prison. Wright had a close friendship with one of the escapees and had wanted to be with her in the punishment section of the prison. Two surviving imprisoned women (DL and JM) who were present when the fire was lit reported that Wright had built and lit the fire in order to be transferred to the cellblock: âIt was common knowledge amongst prisoners that Danielle Wright lit the fire to get herself into trouble ⊠she was irresponsible, hated the system, hated the screws, she didnât care about the consequences of her actions ⊠[she was] very rebelliousâ (Mason 1982, 22 September, 400â401). When asked why they had not âbuzzed upâ to warn duty staff of the fire, DL and JM had both reported that Wright had threatened them with violence if they alerted staff. DL and JM also reported that Clelia Vigano assisted Wright to light the fire in the remand section, because Vigano believed the buildings were in poor shape and should be condemned. One imprisoned woman in the unit told the Coroner that Viganoâs brother was a builder and so she was knowledgeable about building safety standards (Mason 1982, 26 July, 354).
From 5.00 pm papers and magazines were torn up and shoved into cupboards, and mattresses were pulled apart and stacked for fuel under wooden benches. Duty staff alleged that they did not witness or inspect the preparations for the fire (Mason 1982, 26 July, 299, 370â372). The women residing in the dormitories at the time told the authorities that Wright started the fire with a cigarette lighter. The dormitory was an outdated building constructed of weatherboard and was rapidly engulfed in flames. Officers launched an emergency response and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade attended. Two women were rescued and taken to the burns unit at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Wright , Vigano and Catilo (another prisoner present in the unit) were too close to the seat of the fire to be rescued. They died from asphyxiation.
Over the four days of the inquest held in September 1982, the Coroner heard evidence from up to 20 witnesses, including three imprisoned women, about the immediate circumstances of the fire. During the inquest, there were no efforts made to investigate the lack of staffing and safety standards or the conditions experienced by women within Fairlea. There was no attempt to investigate the imprisoned womenâs reports of unrest in the lead-up to the fire. No contextual evidence was presented or investigated about the events preceding the escapes and the lighting of the fire. Coroner Mason instead commended the bravery demonstrated by prison staff attending the emergency response (Mason 1982, 22 September, 423). The Coronerâs finding was largely based on assumptions rather than evidence about Wright and Viganoâs intentions. While both were remand prisoners , Vigano was reportedly about to receive bail and be released from Fairlea in a matter of days. When delivering his findings, Coroner Mason characterised the fire as a felonious act by Wright and Vigano, which, he deemed, resulted in the murder of Catilo (Mason 1982, 22 September, 424).1 This finding of homicide leaves no question as to why the other unsentenced women present in the remand section of the gaol denied having any involvement in the protest and were not more candid in providing information and evidence about the unrest in the gaol at the time. To admit any involvement or speak out in the public Coronerâs Court would have carried grave implications for their legal cases and sentencing. In the absence of any consideration of the systemic factors that contributed to Wrightâs , Catiloâs and Viganoâs deaths in custody , the Coronerâs Court attributed the Fairlea protest fire to âmaliciousâ acts by individual prisoners , further criminalising them when they were unconvicted, obfuscating the stateâs duty of care and shielding the Victorian prison system from due scrutiny.
The prison is a violent institution. It is predicated upon and sustained by the constant threat and occurrence of coercive violence. The prison is enlivened by disciplinary power that reproduces terror, alienation but also resistance. Carceral violence is therefore not exceptional or abnormal; it is routine. It is further sustained and legitimated by the surrounding culture of institutional secrecy and punitiveness. Despite these structuring logics of control and repression, carceral spaces are not experienced uniformly, nor are they totalising. As this opening account suggests, carceral spaces are also frequently sites of resistance and struggle which, in the above instances, were waged by women from the insideâout.
Generally speaking, the early 1980s was a period of intense securitisation in Victoriaâs prison system. This is well documented with regard to the construction of the Jika Jika High-Security Unit in Pentridge Prison , one of Australiaâs most hi-tech supermax units, ostensibly designed for those men prisoners who were deemed âthe worst of the worstâ (Carlton 2007). However, this punitive shift extended decisively to women. At the time that Mason delivered his findings in the Victorian Coronerâs Court, two-thirds of the womenâs prison population had been moved out of the fire-damaged Fairlea Prison and into Pentridge Prisonâs B Annexe and the Jika Jika High-Security Unit. In the latter half of the decade, they were held also in G Division. Inside Pentridge, a prison designated only for men since Fairlea opened in 1956, women were subjected to archaic and squalid conditions, enforced idleness, the over-prescription of sedating medications by prison staff for the purpose of maintaining control over women, and long hours spent in lockdown due to a lack of staffing. Prison authorities used the Fairlea fire as a justification to punish women who expressed concern about their rights or spoke out against conditions. Far from the short-term measure it was purported to be, women were incarcerated in high-security menâs prisons in Victoria for more than a decade: from the time of the fire in February 1982 until 28 July 1993. While isolated in menâs prisons , women were subjected to a secret regime of terror and violence; and seven women died in custody in Pentridge.
While the escape and fire were tragically fatal, they signified a flashpoint of resistance whereby women sought to challenge their invisibility and poor treatment in a system designed for men. This book approaches the violence of incarceration from a local and historical perspective, with our central reference point being womenâs resistance to the continuum of carceral violence that flows from the community to the prison. We examine the gendered dynamics of an expansive carceral regime through the lens of a burgeoning social movement that mobilised to challenge it. Spanning the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, our research explores how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist their conditions of confinement through a combination of reformist strategies, legal challenges and radical direct actions. This âinsideâoutâ activism generated a powerful anti-carceral movement that bolstered and expanded feminist understandings of the workings of power and the potential for social change. Imprisoned women were always located at the centre of the movement which was concerned not only with using reform as a vehicle for holding government to account and challenging conditions, but also with engaging in myriad creative direct actions and methods to breach and overcome the sense of social stigma...