A chance to change: the Sydney home helping break cycles of trauma, violence and jail

The Guardian

2 days ago

Josh* says he's not a violent man, but he has done violent things. It was only after a quarter of his life spent in and out of prison that he came to see the violence didn't happen in a vacuum.
'I had a pretty crap upbringing,' he says, sitting in the courtyard of a nondescript home on a quiet street in inner Sydney. The 42-year-old Gamilaroi man is warm and a fast talker.
'It was me and my brother,' he says. 'I didn't know my parents that well. There was always drugs and alcohol in the home, so I was pretty broken there.'
Josh says his childhood was marked by run-ins with the police for breaking into homes and theft.
'It's sort of the lifestyle that I wanted when I was a kid,' he says. 'It's weird because that's what we thought was cool. Violence was accepted, drugs were accepted.'
When he was about 30, married and with a family, his brother died by suicide. 'That's when my whole life changed,' he says.
'That's when I started using drugs hard, and that's when the domestic violence started.'
Thousands of men in New South Wales prisons have carved a similar path through life.
But Josh is among the lucky few who have received help to change it.
Last June the number of people held on remand in NSW, and the number of Indigenous people in prison, reached a record high.
The same month the Minns government passed legislation making it harder for domestic violence offenders who commit serious offences to get bail. But this had only a small impact on the custody population, according to Jackie Fitzgerald, the executive director at the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar).
The real driver, Fitzgerald says, has been the number of people charged with lower level domestic violence offences such as intimidation and breaching apprehended domestic violence orders.
With more men in prison on domestic violence offences, experts say the obvious question is what is being done to prevent them reoffending on release.
'We know prison doesn't rehabilitate,' says Jess Hill, an investigative journalist and domestic violence advocate.
A 2018 report concluded there was no difference in the likelihood of reoffending between offenders who start the domestic violence-focused program in prison – DVEQUIPS – and those who don't.
But in any case these are offered only to the 14% of domestic violence inmates who have been sentenced for violent offences. The rest have been convicted on less serious charges or have yet to be tried.
Rainbow Lodge is a home for men who are on bail or who have just been released from prison. It's where Josh came some months ago.
He had been remanded in custody for nine months on domestic violence charges when he stood before a judge desperate to get bail. After the death of someone close to him, he had stopped using drugs. This made life inside more dangerous.
'It's hard if you're trying to do good in jail. You don't fit in.
'I was contemplating getting a fake address just to get out of jail,' he says. '[But] if I got out and I was homeless, I would have fallen back in with the old crowd.'
He got lucky. The judge, rather than bailing him to live in the community or returning him to prison, opted for a third option: Rainbow Lodge.
It's the largest of its kind in the state, and there are just eight rooms. It will soon expand to 13 with funding from the City of Sydney and generally runs with a mix of government and private funding.
The ageing terrace on a leafy street in a residential area has a kitchen where the men cook together, and common living spaces. They each have their own room. Each is tidy with artworks and pictures of their families lining the walls.
Cultural workers, psychologists and men with lived experience drop in to see the men and run programs such as art and music therapy. Men who have been through the three-month program are told to drop in again when they like, and they regularly do. The gate is always open.
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'I know it's safe here,' Josh says. He says he had long felt alone and isolated, but much less so since being at the Lodge.
The manager, Claude Robinson, says he gets phone calls every day from lawyers, parole officers and others asking if there is a bed free. There rarely is.
The main aim is to break the cycle of offending and jail time. It's not specifically for violent men, but Robinson says it's on the rap sheet for most.
'We take the men nobody else will,' he says.
They are men like Jarred, who says he has been in custody on six occasions for domestic violence offences.
'I asked my solicitor to try to get me into a rehab, and two weeks later, he had me in a bed here,' he says after finishing one of the daily programs at the Lodge.
'I'm very lucky to be here. [I like] being around all the boys here that want the same thing as me.
'In prison, it's a totally different environment. It's dangerous. There is a hell on earth, and it's jail.
'If anything you get worse.'
The men all have the same undercurrent to their story: trauma and drug use as a Band-Aid. It's a clear cause of their theft or violence offences, Robinson says, therefore it is obvious what needs to be done to stop it – though not easy to achieve.
'For a lot of the guys, they've never been given an opportunity where people take the time to explain what's happened in their lives,' Robinson says.
A psychologist who works for corrections and spoke on condition of anonymity says the department is trying to move towards a trauma-informed approach in its programs, but 'it's slow going'.
'I don't think they're finding that the current suite of programs are targeting the right needs.'
He says change is slow because it means changing the culture in prisons, and 'treating offenders as people who have trauma issues and working through those issues rather than treating them as a number who don't get anything'.
Josh says he couldn't recall anything he learned from domestic violence-focused programs while on a three-year stint in prison.
'EQUIPS is taught out of text books,' he says.
'[This] is culture and it stems to your roots,' he says of programs at the Lodge. 'The teachers here, they've all got lived experience, so you relate to them different. They talk to you different.'
Josh says his favourite part of the program has been time spent with Uncle Bubbly, one of the elders who helps out at the Lodge.
'He teaches me a lot about being a man,' Josh says, his voice quivering with emotion.
Ivan Clarke created one of the programs run specifically for Indigenous men at the Lodge, Healing the Warrior.
When Guardian Australia visits a session, held in another location nearby, Clarke is standing in front of a semi-circle of men talking about anxiety and trauma.
'We grew up being singled out for being black,' Clarke tells the men, who frequently nod while he speaks.
Clarke tells them how being judged from a young age creates anxiety, which turns into being in a constant fight-or-flight mode. That only compounds in a violent home, he says.
'Think about the fear this creates. That stuff travels with us right into our adult life, if we don't tackle it, it stays with us.
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'That doesn't make us bad men, it makes us traumatised men.'
This is his main message. He says the program works because it's delivered by men like himself who have been through what the men have been through.
'The only way that this has worked is because it's designed by Aboriginal men with lived experience. It's facilitated and delivered to Aboriginal men who are living the experience,' he says.
Over a year ago, the Lodge secured funding – and the approval of the governor – to run the same program for men on remand at John Morony Correctional Centre near Windsor, in Sydney's north-west. They wantto expand it to all remand centres.
One man now at the Lodge, who cannot be named for legal reasons, did the program when he was in jail.
'To walk into the program and see that it was an elder, man that was awesome,' he says. 'I hadn't seen it in prison before.'
He went into juvenile detention at a young age. 'It started the process for me,' he says.
He then turned to drugs. 'If I wasn't getting high, I'd still feel the trauma,' he says.
He says doing the program while on remand meant he finally had someone he could ask: 'Why am I feeling like this?'
'I'd been trying to get my life straight but I had no one to turn to.'
There are few programs when men are on remand, because they are presumed innocent. Yet alleged domestic violence offenders spend an average of three months in custody – some up to a year, Hill says.
'You've got these people in a holding bay and most of the time we're not doing anything with them,' she says.
Hill says there needs to be a greater focus on justice reinvestment – focusing on what drives reoffending rather than a purely punitive approach. Asked if she backs what the Lodge is doing, she says she supports whatever has been shown to work.
'Whether it's in prisons or in communities or both, ideally, [justice reinvestment] makes complete sense on every balance sheet, whether that be a fiscal balance sheet or whether it be on a recidivism balance sheet.'
Locking up domestic violence offenders costs the state more than $320,000 a day, according to corrective services figures.
In the government's budget, released in June, the corrective services budget increased by 35%, from $1.7bn in 2024-25 to $2.4bn. There was an 80% increase in the capital expenditure budget for prisons.
Hill says government policy is focused on punishment rather than stopping the cycle of reoffending.
'There's definitely a zeitgeist towards tough on crime. We've seen that all across the country. It's very difficult to get paradigm shifting reform through in Australia, depressingly so.'
Nicole Yade, a chief executive at Women's and Girls' Emergency Centre, says: 'It's really not as simple as locking people up and the problems go away.'
She sees the complexity first-hand, with more than 200 women and children staying in refuges run by the centre every night.
'An AVO doesn't make a difference, they just continue to breach the AVO and then they're locked up again, and they're out again, and they breach it again, and then the cycle continues.
'If we only work with women and children, we're missing half the story.'
'I don't think that prisons are therapeutic environments, and I'm not sure if that work is possible in a prison, to be honest.'
About half the men who come through the Lodge last the full three months. Most of those who drop out end up back in prison.
Robinson, who has been on the board of the Lodge since 2014, says that doesn't mean they have lost their chance to change. He knows this because he was once one of those who dropped out.
He came through the Lodge in 2006 after four and a half years in prison on drug offences. At that point he says it was more of a halfway house. It didn't have the programs it has today.
'I ended up back in jail six weeks later because I got an inheritance, and I just ended up at the Cross again, sitting in the Astoria Hotel with my girlfriend shooting it all up,' Robinson says.
Back in prison he did a program known as Ngara Nura, which has since been axed. He says this is what changed him.
'I remember I got to that program and they said to me: you're not a bad person but your behaviour is unacceptable,' he says.
'No one had ever separated the two, and I think that's what we try to do here in Rainbow.'
Robinson and Clarke say support for men who are outside prison is just as important as for those inside. Many domestic violence offenders never reach sentenced custody, with 74% of DV offenders serving their sentence in the community, according to Bocsar.
Clarke says it's important for judges to have that third option when they know prison or a return to the community are both wrong.
He and Clarke want to see a Lodge equivalent in every region. But they say the key is having men like them with lived experience to run it.
Josh is among the 50% of men who complete three months at the Lodge.
'It's given me time to explore who I am and what I really want,' he says. 'I'm still learning today.'
The next step, away from the people at the Lodge who have become like family, can be the most difficult.
The Lodge helps all those who leave find a house, and stays formally connected with them for another two years to ease their transition. The men are told to visit for a chat or drop into a program whenever they like.
'I know when I leave here I'll stay in close contact with them,' Josh says. 'They're people I want to keep in my life.'
He says his life might have been different if he had come to the Lodge 12 years ago, after his brother died.
'I'm not a violent person, but I've done violent things, and when someone's on drugs, they turn into a totally different person.
'I needed help at that moment. It's sad that that's not offered to people.
'They just throw you in jail and forget about you.'
Full names of the men interviewed have been redacted