Queer/ Trans* | Australian/Aotearoa

Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison and a total of 18 months on Home Detention, Tabitha Lean uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal, and too often deadly, colonial frontier for her people.

This issue of Archer features writing about the prison system and its impacts on First Nations people; how incarceration affects young people, and the children of people who have been imprisoned.Also featured are a story from a writer who was locked in detention; an image essay from Haitian photographer Zarita Zevallos; a Q&A with abolition activist Debbie Kilroy; a speech from Aunty Vickie Roach and more.