Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people in the world. Nationally, Aboriginal people are jailed at a rate five times greater than black males were under Apartheid South Africa. In Western Australia and the Northern Territory the figure is eight times greater.

The disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on Aboriginal people is directly related to this country’s history of colonisation and genocide of Aboriginal people, and the continued subjugation under successive government policies.

Writer, poet activist, Vicki Roach, is an Aboriginal woman, a former prisoner in Victoria, who gained a Masters degree while in prison, and remains to this day an activist and campaigner against the prison industrial complex. In 2007 she lead and won, a High Court challenge to the Howard Government’s ban on prisoners’ right to vote – again, achieving this from a cell at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre women’s prison.

Vicki gave a talk at the Marxism conference in 2014 about women and the criminal injustice system. And sadly, very little has changed. But with the current focus on the crisis in juvenile justice, I thought it was worth hearing Vicki’s words again, and particularly her story from juvie to adult prison, to activist.