Warning for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island readers, this article contains the name of a deceased Aboriginal person.
There has been a quiet shift in the way “lived experience” is being used across the “justice reform” sector. What was once supposed to represent the voices, knowledge and leadership of criminalised people has increasingly become a credential, something organisations display to legitimise their work.
But a credential is not the same thing as community.
Across Australia, we are seeing more and more organisations appoint “lived experience representatives” to boards, advisory groups and consultative panels. These appointments are often held up as proof that the organisation is accountable to criminalised people.
Yet when you look more closely, many of the people occupying these roles have not set foot back inside a prison since the day they were released.
This is not to dismiss the value of their own prison experiences. Those experiences matter. They shape understanding and political analysis in ways that cannot be learned in universities or policy institutes.
But we have to ask a serious question: what does it actually mean to represent a community you no longer walk alongside?
Prisons are not static institutions. They are dynamic environments shaped by rapidly changing legislation, policies, technologies and cultures. Over the last decade alone we have seen sweeping bail changes, harsher sentencing regimes, new surveillance technologies, expanded policing powers and an intensification of punitive law-and-order politics across the country.
Inside prisons, conditions shift constantly. Security classifications change. Units open and close. Prison cultures evolve. Prison policies change. Issues within the prisons constantly ebb and flow. New hierarchies emerge. Access to programs, phones, visits and healthcare fluctuates with policy and budget decisions.
Anyone who has spent time in prison knows how quickly things can change.
The prison someone experienced ten or twenty years ago, even five years ago, may be vastly different to the prison someone is entering today.
So, when organisations rely on people who have been disconnected from prison communities for years to provide “expert advice,” we have to question whether that advice is grounded in current realities.
Representation cannot be frozen in time.
And then there is another category entirely: people who claim to represent criminalised communities but who no longer mix with those communities at all. They do not spend time with people coming out of prison, and instead do most of their work alongside uncriminalised people. They do not attend the grassroots gatherings, the organising meetings, the support networks where real conversations about survival, safety and resistance are happening.
In some cases, they have actively distanced themselves from the very communities they claim to represent. Yet they continue to sit on panels, advisory bodies and boards shaping decisions as the “lived experience voice.”
This matters because these positions are not neutral.
Large, well-funded organisations routinely use these appointments to legitimise their work. They stack boards and advisory groups with token lived experience positions and then point to those positions as evidence that their programs are community informed. But if the people filling those roles are disconnected from the communities they claim to represent, then what we are looking at is not representation.
It is theatre. And those filling these roles are often influenced by the need for validation and self-promotion.
The consequences of this are serious. When organisations rely on disconnected voices, the services they design often fail to reflect the needs, priorities and realities of criminalised people.
Programs are developed based on outdated assumptions. Policy positions are shaped by second-hand knowledge. Consultation becomes a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine process of listening and accountability, and the organisations themselves remain comfortable, insulated from critique by the presence of a token “lived experience advisor.”
Recently, this issue came into sharp focus when the Northern Territory Coordinator for the Justice Reform Initiative, Rocket Bretherton, posted publicly that she had entered a prison on a professional visit for the first time since her release in 2019.
The post prompted a broader question about what organisations mean when they describe someone as bringing “deep subject matter expertise” through lived experience, particularly when that expertise is intended to inform contemporary policy, advocacy and reform. Lived experience does not expire. No amount of time can erase what someone has survived or the knowledge they have gained from it. At the same time, prisons are constantly changing institutions.
The circumstances of that visit also raise broader questions about how organisations facilitate and shape that engagement.
Bretherton attended the prison alongside a representative from ACSO, an organisation that delivers a range of correctional services funded by governments, including programs inside prisons and supervision services in the community. ACSO has expanded its work across several jurisdictions and describes itself as maintaining longstanding connections with the judiciary. It occupies an important place within Australia’s correctional landscape.
Following the visit, an ACSO staff member posted a TikTok video saying, “Victoria do a lot of things well… got to give credit where credit is due.” Reflecting on the visit, Rocket spoke positively about aspects of the Victorian prison system, including programs, education and family support.
Many people currently imprisoned in Victoria, particularly Aboriginal women and others who continue to experience strip searching, prolonged lockdowns, barriers to healthcare and separation from family, would likely have very different accounts of those same institutions.
Neither account is the whole story. The question is whose experiences organisations privilege when they claim to speak with the authority of lived expertise.
This is why questions about ongoing connection matter. The people we visit with, the organisations we work alongside, and the communities we remain accountable to inevitably shape what we see, what we hear and how we understand prisons.
This is not simply about one individual. It is a structural question about how organisations understand representation, accountability and lived expertise.
Bretherton’s public biography describes her as a proud Noongar woman with deep subject matter expertise as a result of her experience in the Northern Territory justice system. Since 2019 she has worked to raise awareness about the failures of that system and has served as an expert advisor on numerous panels relating to justice, mental health and disability. But the broader question remains: what should organisations expect of people appointed to represent prison communities? If lived expertise is being relied upon to inform current policy and practice, should those roles involve ongoing engagement with people who remain imprisoned and with criminalised communities?
And perhaps more importantly: why are organisations so comfortable appointing representatives who are disconnected from the people they claim to represent?
The answer is not complicated.
Disconnected representation is easier.
It is easier for organisations to work with people who operate comfortably within professional advocacy spaces, who speak the language of policy consultations and advisory committees, and who are less likely to challenge the structural foundations of the organisations themselves.
People who remain deeply embedded within criminalised communities often bring different, and sometimes sharper, critiques. They carry fresh knowledge of the violence of prisons. They bring the messy, uncomfortable realities of life under surveillance, supervision and stigma.
They are harder for institutions to manage. They are also far more likely to tell the truth.
If organisations are serious about engaging with lived prison experience, then they must move beyond tokenism.
Representation is not a permanent credential. It is an ongoing relationship.
That means recognising that lived experience is not just something that happened in the past. It continues to exist through relationships, ongoing connection and accountability to community.
It should be understood as a responsibility, one that requires ongoing engagement with the people whose experiences are being invoked.
Because without that connection, what organisations call “lived experience representation” becomes little more than a convenient story.
And criminalised communities deserve far better than that.
The absolute ACCURACY in this article thank you it needed to be said 🖤💛❤️