Introduction by Croakey: Following an inspection of the Southern Queensland Correctional Centre in November 2023, the Queensland Ombudsman has highlighted the need to improve access to primary healthcare, recommending the West Moreton Hospital and Health Service, which runs the medical centre, increase access for women to medical, dental and mental health services until the long waitlists are reduced.
While the Ombudsman notes the Centre, at Spring Creek west of Brisbane, was clean, well-maintained and not overcrowded, it also put forward 37 recommendations for areas of improvement for the women’s prison, and said “the number of women detained there is increasing”.
The recommendations include, but are not limited to, the need to find a more private location for health assessments, prioritise the delivery of specialist mental health and trauma support for women at the centre, cease reissuing torn, worn-out or stained clothing, update its Food and Nutrition Guidelines 2009 as a priority, and improve menstruation management.
Below, Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy OAM, two founding members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, explore the deprived dignity of women in prisons, emphasising that menstrual health is a human right.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy write:
A recent report by the Queensland Ombudsman exposed appalling conditions of the Southern Queensland Correctional Centre, including long waitlists for healthcare, unwearable clothes and poor hygiene and menstruation management.
The findings of the report, from a November 2023 inspection of the Correctional Centre, located west of Brisbane, are grim. It confirms what advocacy organisation, Sisters Inside, has been saying for more than three decades – Queensland’s prisons are breaching the human rights of the women they incarcerate.
The report describes how some of our most vulnerable women in the prison’s so-called ‘safety unit’ – those who are at risk of self-harm or suicide – are being denied their dignity in ways that should shock the conscience of everyone in our community.
Women in the unit, some of whom are menstruating, are forced to wear suicide-resistant gowns – or canvas smocks as we call them on the floor – that cover only the torso and upper legs. If they are not approved to wear underwear or shorts, they have no way to secure a sanitary product.
The result? Menstrual blood soaking through their clothing, sheets, and cells.
Correctional staff reported witnessing this degrading reality firsthand, according to the findings. The staff’s proposed solution – telling women to hold a sanitary pad between their legs – is as humiliating as it is ineffective.
I wore a canvas smock for more than seven days when I was placed in solitary confinement during my incarceration and was not approved to wear underwear during that time. I remember when I first entered the cell in the smock I refused to lie down on the mat on the floor (there are no beds in solitary) because I was conscious that the officers passing by would be able to see right up my “dress”. I felt exposed, humiliated and violated. The officers used to yell at me to lay down, because I looked odd just standing there, smack bang in the middle of my empty cell. The whole experience was harrowing.” – Tabitha Lean
This is not just a matter of period poverty. This is deliberate deprivation. A fundamental denial of dignity, autonomy, and humanity.
In a joint submission with Sisters Inside to the Queensland Police Service Watch-House Review in December last year, Share the Dignity argued for the provision of period products for people who menstruate while in police custody.
The submission said:
Menstrual health is a fundamental human right, which means access to period products is essential when someone has no means of self-supply, such as in the case of women and girls who are detained in watch-houses. Failure to provide or offer period products including pads, tampons and sanitary bins is to neglect the basic human needs of people who menstruate.”
Upon reading the Queensland Ombudsman’s report, Rochelle Courtenay, Founder of Share the Dignity, told us, “I was outraged to read how women were forced to manage their periods while in custody. It is inhumane that they were left to hold a pad between their legs because they weren’t given underwear. I cannot imagine the vulnerability of being in that situation, only to have any last shred of dignity stripped away. This is a fundamental failure of basic human rights, and I cannot believe this is still happening in 2025.”
Deprivation of dignity
Women in Queensland prisons are suffering. This is not hyperbole. As a National Network of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls, we know firsthand the gross human rights violations that occur daily behind bars.
While public discussions about ‘period poverty’ focus on economic barriers to accessing sanitary products, the reality in prisons is even darker – this is deprivation by design.
Queensland Corrective Services responded to the report by stating it is working with a university to design “safer” underwear to accommodate sanitary pads.
This response is grossly inadequate. Women do not need experimental clothing designs – they need their basic human rights upheld. The fact that tampons and even disposable underwear have been removed due to self-harm concerns is not a justification for further depriving incarcerated women of dignity. It is an indictment of a system that consistently sees punishment, not protection, as the answer to vulnerability.
The treatment of women in Queensland’s prisons is not an isolated incident. Across the country, incarcerated women and girls – many of whom are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander – are subject to systemic neglect and abuse.
Girls in watch-houses are given paper underwear; leaving blood to run down their little legs. The girls resort to using toilet paper like a tampon, and then when they run out of toilet paper, the officers refuse to give them anymore. This is a health issue, this is inhumane, and this is the reality of imprisonment for girls in Australia in 2025.
The inspector’s recommendations call for “humane, dignified, and hygienic” menstruation management strategies for incarcerated women.
But the mere fact that such recommendations are necessary exposes the sheer cruelty of our prison system. If we need a government report to tell us that menstruating women deserve access to underwear and sanitary products, then our society is failing at the most basic level of decency.
The inhumane treatment of women behind bars is not an accident. It is the inevitable result of a system built on punishment rather than care.
It is not enough to tinker around the edges with ‘new designs’ of prison underwear. We must demand radical change, one that does not accept the brutalisation of women as a routine function of incarceration.
Women in prison are human beings. They deserve dignity. They deserve better. And we will not remain silent in the face of their suffering.
About the authors
Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe.
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent over two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers. An unapologetic abolitionist, Debbie’s activism work centres on dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and all forms of carceral control and exile. With a firm belief that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’, Debbie established the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to centre the voices, experiences and aspirations of criminalisation and imprisonment women and girls in order to change the face of justice in this country.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on human rights.
