Up to 80 organisations were represented, including community legal centres, Indigenous rights organisations, people with the lived experience of imprisonment and institutionalisation, housing and welfare services, women’s family violence services, adult community education programs, local government, faith-based prisoner support organisations, Indigenous Issues Unit (Victorian Department of Justice), Reprieve Australia, community broadcasters, diverse community activists and university law faculties.

 

The forum facilitated organisations across Victoria to:

 

- Identify common issues and priorities in relation to working with imprisoned people and recently released people;

- Be presented an overview of new and existing legal services for imprisoned people;

- Develop and implement strategies that advance a decarceration agenda; and

- Form a sustainable and effective network of individuals and agencies to continue to advocate for decarceration, alternatives to imprisonment and human rights for imprisoned people

 

The following were some key priorities and strategies for action identified at the forum:

 

- Need to communicate broadly and strategically the financial as well as the human costs of imprisonment and increasing imprisonment rates;

- Continuing lack of awareness surrounding issues for women in, and upon release from prison;

- Issues impacting imprisoned transgender people with a focus on vulnerability to sexual and physical violence in custody;

- Need to build alliances and solidarity with building and teachers unions;

- Need to work with/alongside local government and their services around post-release and community development issues;

- Working with academics to increase research/evidence base capacities and to resource test case litigation;

- Necessity for a decarceration network that can pool and share information, develop email and website links, meet quarterly, develop and sustain database of pre and post release services, develop strategic alliances and potentially hold an equivalent forum inside prisons;

- Need to share/minimise risks between organisations of speaking out on prison issues including threats to funding, and silencing of community/service sectors;

- Need to continue challenging cultures and practices of secrecy surrounding prisons;

- Defining and linking service provision to decarceration objectives;

- Avoidance of advocating strategies that transfer people from one institutionalisation to another;