DAVID ADAMS speaks to Diane Spicer, CEO of Prison Network, about the Victorian-based organisation’s mission to support women prisoners in Victoria as well as how her personal story of overcoming trauma helped prepare her for the role…
Every week in Victoria, a group of volunteer women head into the state’s two women’s prisons – the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne’s outer west and the minimum security Tarrengower Prison in Maldon – to bring some hope and light to those incarcerated within the walls.
There they lead the prisoners in some recreational activities and teach some life skills – but most of all, they simply provide a listening ear.
“Our program are…vehicles to connect with the women…” says Diane Spicer, chief executive officer of Prison Network. “They see us as their friends; they’re very willing…to sit and tell us all their problems. But we’re someone that they can trust and, in their words, we’re someone that’s consistent. We’re there every week.”
LIFE INSIDE: Prison Network volunteers meet with prisoners inside Victoria’s two prisons for women every week, offering support and friendship. PICTURE: Robert Hickerson/www.unsplash.com
“Our programs are…vehicles to connect with the women…They see us as their friends; they’re very willing…to sit and tell us all their problems. But we’re someone that they can trust and, in their words, we’re someone that’s consistent. We’re there every week.”
– Diane Spicer, chief executive officer of Prison Network.
Prison Network is this year marking 70 years since it was founded by Melbourne woman Myrtle Breen. While still only aged in her 20s, she felt God’s calling to go and visit women incarcerated in the city’s (now demolished) Pentridge Prison to provide someone to talk to and to do what she could to help them.
“She would just go in every week, sit with the women, talk with them, really listen to what their needs were and then see what she could do to meet their individual needs,” says Ms Spicer.
Ms Breen was joined by Lois Tithridge and Marj Swales and they continued to visit women in Pentridge and then women in Fairlea, the state’s first women’s prison, after it was was opened in 1956. When Fairlea closed in 1996, their work continued at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (then known as the Melbourne Metropolitan Women’s Prison) and, after it opened in 1988, Tarrengower.
These days the ministry – which changed its name from Campaigners for Christ Prison Ministries to Prison Network – has some 70 volunteers – about half of whom work in the two prisons – as well as employing a full time senior support worker, Laurel Gore, and five part time staff.
Ms Spicer, who is one of the latter, having taken on the role of CEO about two years ago from previous CEO Deb Redford, says the network isn’t about proselytizing the women in prisons but simply showing them God’s love.
“We’re the Christians, we don’t expect them to convert…We want them to see what life could be like for them. Our role is to be professional service providers.”
The 57-year-old, who also works part time for specialist executive coaching organisation Halftime Australia, never imagined she’d be working in a prison. Having moved to Australia with her now ex-husband and their two children 12 years ago, she was looking for a job in administration and applied for one at a TAFE school. It turned out to be a TAFE school located within the Malmsbury Juvenile Justice Centre.
A job with Christian ministry Prison Fellowship followed and then another which saw her working to introduce Christian TV into prisons across Australia on behalf of God TV. Then, two years ago, she was asked to step into the role of CEO for Prison Network.
While Ms Spicer says she initially felt out of her depth working in prison, she believes God has been able to use her personal experience of coming out of addiction and abuse and trauma to relate to the prisoners she met.
Raised in an Italian Catholic family from Queens in New York, Ms Spicer was sexually abused by a neighbour as a child over a number of years which led, she says, to her turning to drugs, drinking and promiscuity and resulted in her entering into a number of destructive relationships.
Despite this background and what was then an ongoing addiction to cocaine, Ms Spicer says she managed to hold down a high-flying executive job at a top US company.
“I did everything first class, I had all the money…fulfilled the American dream, ticked all the boxes,” she recalls. “[But] inside I was absolutely empty. I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated the image that I had to keep up. And the whole lifestyle, I just knew it wasn’t right for me, but couldn’t do anything about it, I was stuck, I was trapped.”
At the age of 34, having gotten married and started a family, she “crashed” when her eight-week-old son Alex contracted whooping cough and pneumonia.
“They told us he wasn’t going to make it and I got down on the floor of the hospital and I cried out to a God I knew existed because I grew up Catholic,” Ms Spicer recalls. “But I was convinced He was punishing me at that time, because of…everything. I just said, ‘If you’re real, take my life, take my son’s life, I don’t want to live any more, I’m not fit to be a mum’.”
“That night I remember falling asleep on the floor…in the hospital room and I woke up the next morning and doctors and nurses were in the room with Alex. One nurse had Alex in her arms – an African American nurse, I’ll never forget her – and she was saying ‘Praise the Lord, Jesus has healed your son’. And the doctors are yelling at her and I’m yelling at her saying not very nice things to her – I thought he had passed away, but the truth was he was healed and God had healed him. And that was the start of a journey which I’m still on.”
A LIFE REDEEMED: Diane Spicer, chief executive of Prison Network, who says her own life story helped prepare her for the role.
The next few years saw God heal Ms Spicer of her addictions and start to address the abuse and trauma she had faced earlier in her life as He stripped away her masks to reveal the woman underneath.
“I can’t thank God enough for what He’s done in my own personal life and how He uses my story – to me it’s the most incredible example of redemption. You know, He’s taken every part that was broken in my life and He’s redeeming it. I was in an emotional prison for years of my life and didn’t even know it and now I’m working in a prison [helping others].”
Since taking up the role of CEO of Prison Network, Ms Spicer says she’s seen many connections made between the volunteers and staff, and the prisoners through the many programs which, as well as arts and crafts sessions and sports and fitness-oriented activities for the women, also include ‘Fun with Mum’ Sundays when the volunteers bring children into the prisons to be with their mothers.
But for Ms Spicer, the highlight have been the surprise ‘pamper’ days Prison Network volunteers run for prisoners attending their programs during which they give the women facials, do their nails and, in a symbolic gesture imitating that of Christ at the Last Supper, wash their feet.
“Inevitably every time the women wind up in tears,” says Ms Spicer. “We sit there and we wash their feet. To hear the comments – the majority of women that we’re dealing with have been in trauma [and] quite a few of them have been in prostitution so to have someone touch them with love, it undoes them. It undoes us…God’s love is for everyone. His blood was shed so that everyone could be forgiven and redeemed no matter what they’ve done.“
The volunteers who take part in Prison Network – working with prisoners while they are incarcarated but also after their release – are aged from their early 20s through to their late 70s and come from a variety of backgrounds. Ms Spicer says one of the great strengths of the organisation is that the women (and it’s predominantly women who are involved) come from a variety of different Christian denominations.
“I really believe we’re one body and the people in prison need to see one body,” she says. “I was so blessed – one of the women prisoners said to me: ‘Wait, so she’s from a Catholic Church and you’re from an AoG church’ – and one of the women was Greek Orthodox – ‘How do you guys all get along?’…And I said, ‘This is the body of Christ at work and this is the way it should be. We all get together and we’re all on one team and we all bring different perspectives’. And that’s what I love about it.”
To support the work of Prison Network, see www.prisonnetwork.org.au/youcanhelp or contact (03) 9873 4190.
