There is a particular cruelty in the way this country talks about “personal responsibility” while systematically constructing the conditions that make survival harder for criminalised people at every turn.
Criminalised and formerly incarcerated people are among the most economically excluded and socially abandoned groups in Australia. We are overrepresented in unemployment statistics, housing instability, child protection intervention, poverty, disability, mental distress, family violence victimisation, and single parenthood. Many people leaving prison return to communities with no stable housing, no income security, fractured family relationships, and ongoing state surveillance. For Aboriginal people especially, these realities are inseparable from colonial violence, child removal, racism, and the deliberate destruction of community structures.
Yet despite this, criminalised people are constantly spoken about as though we exist outside of structural disadvantage. As though prison is simply a consequence of “bad choices” rather than a mechanism that deepens poverty, strips opportunity, and entrenches exclusion.
Prison itself produces disadvantage. A criminal record closes doors to employment, housing, education, insurance, volunteering, travel, and community participation. Time inside often means losing custody of children, losing homes, losing jobs, losing social networks, and losing years of earning capacity. The stigma follows long after release. Many people live under perpetual suspicion, forced to repeatedly prove their worthiness to systems that have already decided who they are.
This matters because disadvantage shapes what people are actually able to do when confronted with institutions, legal systems, bureaucracy, and conflict.
The legal system likes to pretend everyone enters the room equally. They do not.
When someone is exhausted, traumatised, impoverished, isolated, and already carrying the weight of criminalisation, their capacity to “fight” is profoundly affected. Many people plead guilty not necessarily because they believe they are guilty, but because they cannot survive the alternative. The promise of a sentencing discount for an early plea becomes less about accountability and more about exhaustion management. It becomes risk minimisation. A calculation made by people who often have no emotional, financial, or psychological reserves left.
For someone already struggling to survive, contesting charges can mean weeks or months (or worse, years) of lost work opportunities, transport costs, legal fees, childcare pressures, repeated court appearances, and unbearable stress. The system knows this. The pressure to capitulate is built into its design.
The same dynamic exists outside criminal courts.
People denied Working with Children Checks often face labyrinthine review processes requiring legal literacy, emotional stamina, documentation, advocacy, and time. Many simply cannot do it. Not because they lack merit, but because disadvantage narrows the capacity to navigate hostile systems. A rejection letter can effectively end someone’s employment future, particularly for women whose work histories are already shaped by criminalisation and care work. Theoretically, review rights exist. Practically, rights are meaningless when people lack the resources to exercise them.
Civil disputes operate similarly. Debt claims, tenancy matters, family law proceedings, administrative reviews; these systems assume people possess stability, money, literacy, transport, internet access, confidence, and time. Many criminalised people possess none of those things consistently. Some go bankrupt. Some consent to unjust outcomes simply to make the process stop. Some disengage entirely because survival itself already consumes every available resource.
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This raises a serious question about what we mean when we talk about justice in this country.
Can a system genuinely claim fairness when outcomes are so heavily determined by access to money, time, social capital, education, emotional capacity, and institutional legitimacy? When some people can absorb years of litigation while others cannot afford a single hour away from work? When “rights” exist mostly for those with the capacity to exercise them?
The mythology of equal justice depends on ignoring material inequality.
Criminalised people are expected to “move forward” while carrying barriers that touch nearly every aspect of life. We are told to rehabilitate while being denied employment. Told to rebuild while being locked out of housing. Told to contribute while being permanently marked as risky, dangerous, dishonest, or undeserving. Told to advocate responsibly while understanding that institutions, organisations and individuals with access to expensive lawyers can often weaponise legal systems against us in ways we simply cannot withstand.
Then society frames our exhaustion as personal weakness.
Sometimes it is the institutions, organisations or individuals who themselves purport to advocate for the criminalised that leverage their privilege to access lawyers against the vulnerable people whom they claim to support.
But there is nothing irrational about capitulating when the consequences of resistance could destroy what little stability someone has managed to build.
If we actually cared about justice, we would stop pretending legal processes occur on neutral ground. We would acknowledge that poverty, trauma, criminalisation, racism, gendered violence, disability, and state surveillance fundamentally shape a person’s ability to defend themselves, assert rights, or survive institutional conflict.
And we would ask a far more uncomfortable question: What does accountability mean in a society where the size of one’s purse determines the outcome?
[*Editors note: paragraphs relating to defamation have been removed for legal reasons.]
I’m inclined to agree with much of this but find it hard to believe that those with criminal records are at high risk of defamation procedures..especially of the sort where the very wealthy use it strategically to silence people.
Not to put too fine a point on it those wealthy enough to use threatened civil action to silence people live in totally different spaces to those with criminal records who are all too often bereft of voices. The seriously wealthy typically do not know or care what the under-priviledged might think or say. They use strategic law suits against the media and political opponents (broadly defined) who have loud voices.
Perhaps the writers know of some imporverished people with criminal records who have been on the receiving end of legal harrassment but I very much doubt they are the usual targets.