In Conversation: Tina McPhee and the Reality of Detention

On Friday the 10th of October, I sat down to interview Tina McPhee, not knowing exactly what to expect. It happened, entirely by coincidence, to be on World Mental Health Day which seems extremely fitting in hindsight.

Tina is a lived-experience criminologist, researcher and advocate for the complete abolition of prisons, and much of her work foregrounds the impact that carceral environments have on mental health, wellbeing and dignity. Her commitment to justice transformation is grounded in what she witnessed during her time in the Adelaide Women’s Prison, where she observed systemic patterns of harm that shaped her approach to research and advocacy.

This past term, I have had the unique privilege of learning from Tina as my tutor for one of my university courses so getting the chance to speak to her outside of class was no less than exhilarating.

In our conversation, Tina discusses how current criminal legal responses prioritise punishment over accountability, and why practices such as solitary confinement undermine rehabilitation and wellbeing. She outlined a vision for community safety that is built on care, responsibility and structural support, rather than isolation.

For Tina, meaningful change requires re-examining the systems we rely on and considering models of justice beyond punishment.

How did your experience inside prison shape your understanding of the system?

MCPHEE: After five years being in a women's prison… you learn very quickly what happens to people who don't adapt well to the prison environment… it's “adapt or be punished or perish”. For a lot of people - especially women with any kind of disability, mental health trauma, real harms from drug and alcohol use - their initial phase of prison was very traumatic, so a lot of people end up in the high security unit…

This is one lady; I will never forget her… I remember [when] I was up in the library… she walked past me, and as she was walking past the two male staff, they started goading her and teasing her, and she was obviously heavily medicated but they were calling her names, they were laughing and sniggering at her, which then encouraged other women to laugh and snigger at her— so it’s terrible, predatory, bullying behaviour that... So, you see the way people end up in the prison system - it's just because a system has let them down and that is why they're there or they are there because they have just been in the worst situation or a terrible relationship of violence and this is what it's come to – to being in prison.

But seeing extremely vulnerable people in there who should never, ever be in a prison environment and then… watching this viciousness of staff and other people getting involved in that kind of targeting is really, really awful and the encouragement of that by a prison system or there's just a complete indifference to someone suffering.

I feel like that's what people don't understand as well, and maybe some people do fundamentally believe in punishment that, ‘Oh well, they deserved it in the first place’, but I think when they're thinking of that, they've got these ideas of people that you see painted in the media, of these really dangerous, harmful, bad people, but when you hear the real stories of who is actually in there and who is experiencing that kind of harm, I feel like people… would have some kind of reaction … that that was wrong and we shouldn't be treating people like that.

Do you think prison works to teach people ‘a lesson’ about crime?

MCPHEE: So [from a] practical perspective, it definitely doesn't teach anyone a lesson.

If women were experiencing real emotional distress, they tell you no crying around the compound – even if you're on the phone and someone has died in your family, if you cry for longer than a couple of hours, you're immediately threatened with, “If you start crying around the compound, you'll go up to HSU”, which is solitary confinement. So, do not show your emotions. So, women would hide in each other's… units and console each other, but try and keep this veneer of being okay, because of the fear.

So, it was used as a behavioural control mechanism — the threat of solitary confinement.

All that teaches is the opposite of what you want someone to do when they are released from a prison environment - which is to be in touch with their emotions and express their emotions in a healthy way… They use [solitary confinement] often because either they are understaffed, or there's too many people in the prison or people just find it really difficult to cope with that kind of brutalising environment… and so sometimes going up to a high security unit, practically for a prison, interrupts that, right?

It doesn't solve anything, in fact, it’s going to make things worse when that person ultimately has to come back down because not only have, they lost their place in that little community of the prison… It just makes it worse and it's teaching that person that you cannot have emotions and that we cannot deal with triggers, we can't deal with disagreements, we can't deal with times when their mental health is suffering. We can't deal with that in a community, you have to be removed and hidden away from everyone.

When women have self-harmed or they're talking about self-harm… everything's removed from them, you’re put into solitary confinement in a canvas gown, and the creepy part of this is, that they would make women in the textiles unit… sew those gowns the staff would call them the ‘suicide gowns’.

So, not only are women sewing the suicide gowns of their fellow women who may end up in solitary confinement… but it's also reinforcing the whole idea of this is what you'll be wearing if you misbehave or if you allow your mental health to dip or to outwardly show that you are struggling.

So, you must hold all of that in, and I think that's one of the worst examples of the way that institution itself just reinforces this whole...

But from an abolition perspective, it's harmful. It is actively harming. All of the research and evidence show us that moving people to solitary confinement is extremely harmful. Even the threat of it is harmful.

When I was in the pre-release centre… I had been turned down for home detention, for the fifth time and I was so despaired… and I got in the shower and I felt so sad and… I was shaving my legs… and I nicked my ankle bone… and this voice as clear as day came into my head and said, “If you just run that razor down your wrist long ways, you will feel better” and I looked at the razor for a second and then this other voice… going, “Tina, what the fuck are you doing? Throw that razor away”, so I threw it away… and I couldn't tell anyone.

I knew I couldn't tell anyone because if I told someone that I was feeling that low and that distressed, they would have packed up my room and moved me back to mainstream and then that would be a reason not to let me out. So, I could never share that, I just had to push that down and find a way to get over it myself.

But that's what that teaches, right? That whole, “We're not going to deal with anything”. Teaching people to suffer on their own. If I didn't have that other strong voice, then that would have been a moment where I lost my life in prison because of prison games and because that whole system says, “Your suffering doesn't matter, we're either indifferent to it or we're partaking in that suffering” or somehow I deserve to suffer – my prison sentence and being removed from community is not enough, the prison must make you suffer too.

I feel like that is the hardest part of doing non-reformist reform work - so trying to do reforms that actively shrink the system, not reforms that hold it up or worse, expand it.

You weren't allowed to… ring out for any external mental health support, everything has to be done through the prison, and they'll say that's because, you know, they want to prevent deaths in custody, but it's not about that. It's because if you told people what was going on, on the outside as it was happening, medical staff would have to intervene or have to publicly do that... So, for me, that's about not having any more witnesses to the torture that prisons put people through and when you're thinking about that in terms of children it’s so much worse.

I was a woman in my 40s who was able to… have very clear a lifetime of experience, of surviving some pretty horrible stuff, which then made me a little bit more resilient to those extreme harms, but if you haven't had a lifetime of experience… I can't imagine the kind of harm that would do.

I know there's not a lot of research on the damage to children in solitary confinement, but there's plenty of research on children and punishment and if the research on the harms to adults in solitary confinement, which can be extrapolated and applied to children. We just have to imagine that it's far worse for kids.

What do you think needs to change to make things better, especially for children?

MCPHEE: Any kind of talk of solitary confinement, the prison always tries to talk about it in the ways of, it's just a management unit or they call it all kinds of names other than solitary confinement, right? So, for me, that's an indicator that they know it's wrong, otherwise they’d just be calling it solitary confinement in a child prison because that is what it is…

I don't think policy is necessarily the way to go, because... the State somehow will always try to return back to the status quo and what it's already built and the way it's already operating… Legal challenges and civil suits are probably one of the better ways of managing or dismantling some of these harmful practices.

I don't think human rights legislation has any teeth anymore sadly, I don't think nation states really care about human rights abuses anymore.

We see that all the time – two States have set aside the Human Rights Act when it comes to children, so if we're actively okay with doing that and the political majority is like, “Oh, that's fine”, then I think enacting or calling on politicians to recognise the human rights obligations— I actually don't think they care, I think they care more about power and immediate humiliation.

The other thing is the power of the public… to make sure that we are having conversations with people and we really try— rather than just speaking into our own communities, but when it comes to talking to people who might have either different views or are completely indifferent and… they spend little time thinking about the harm done to other people because either they're actively trying to survive in what is a pretty brutal and hard world at the moment, or if it's because they feel very protected and cozy and the system is working for them, they're the people that we try to have conversations with and the more we do that.

I don't think you can underestimate the power of story when it comes to reaching people who maybe never had thought about the harms of solitary confinement before, who had never thought about really what happens in prison – they just considered it as a fate reserved for others and it's not until people end up knowing someone or having a family member who's in prison that suddenly they're very concerned about what happens in there.

I don't know how to drag the public and change public sentiment to the point that we really need to, we need a large group of people to start going, “This is not right” …

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Tina’s perspective challenges the assumptions we often make about prisons and the people within them. Her reflections remind us that incarceration does not repair harm or address the underlying causes of offending. Instead, it isolates individuals from the care and support needed for genuine change.

Tina’s call to rethink our approach to justice aligns closely with our work at No Child in Solitary. If we want safer communities, we must move beyond systems built on punishment and toward responses grounded in dignity, accountability and support.

This conversation is a reminder that a fairer future begins with listening and being willing to imagine something better.