Four years and 600 clients after devising a bold plan to shrink the number of women behind bars, lawyer Jill Prior is still shocked by the ‘horror stories’ she hears.
For Prior, the co-founder and principal legal officer of the Law and Advocacy Centre for Women (LACW), these small wins — keeping troubled, marginalised women out of jail — make leaving work at 8pm completely worth it.
For almost four years Prior has been doing just that. She and fellow lawyer Elena Pappas set up LACW in February 2016 in response to the dramatic increase in the number of women behind bars in Victoria.
Since then, they’ve represented hundreds of clients charged with everything from first-time shoplifting to murder, and weathered headwinds in the form of tough new bail laws, which have been criticised for making it harder to keep vulnerable women out of custody.
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