About Time dedicates many of its pages to publishing the letters of people in prison, as well as from their family and friends.
This is the centrepiece of the paper: a platform for people to share their experiences and learn from each other.
I write to extend feedback – re: your monthly paper. I must say that it was with more than the usual measuring spoon of interest that most here @ MRC welcomed its arrival.
12 months into being remanded in custody. I’m still yet to be sentenced – hence I can’t see the end at all.
We are encouraged to maintain contact with our support people, our wives, our families, and our friends. This upcoming price increase will reduce the amount of contact we will be able to have with our supports.
What I’m hoping to achieve by writing this is awareness of the care I receive and the stubbornness of the exceptional circumstances parole in Queensland.
I’ve made the most of my time in jail this time and have made myself a promise to not just waste my time here, but to learn as much as I can, study, get fit, do as many programs as possible, and come out a better person than I came in as. I've achieved that, and more.
Why are jails so populated by people who are uneducated? What is being missed by the courts and cops and the community that the process of jailing people is formed around the process of not educating people or not identifying the problems in school?
GROW is a community-based national organisation that works on mental wellbeing using a 12 step program of personal growth of mutual help and support. It operates through weekly peer support groups.
I moved units about a month ago and we feed some stray cats here. One even let me pat her last night! It's been over a year since I've patted an animal, so you can imagine how excited I was!
Reading other prisoner’s stories inspired me to keep my head up and keep going now four months in, thank you all who share your stories and words of wisdom.
I have been incarcerated for 22 months of a four-year sentence in Queensland jails. This poem is about my own situation.
On 1 November 2025, QCS introduced a new pricing model: 20 cents per minute for all calls, mobile or local. A call that once cost 30 cents for 15 minutes now costs $3 – a ten-times increase.
I was 40 years old when I was incarcerated and I could barely run around the block.

Prison reflects you like a mirror, you regret every mistake in your life. Everything. And if you want, it brings you back on the right way.

I pretty much have to pick and choose who I ring because it costs way too much money to ring each of my kids.

Now about jail and what it does to you inside: you learn to suppress your feelings and show your anger or bravado. But what happens then to you? You forget how to love.

Before anything I am a human being. As I’ve learnt, this is quite important to remember.

I am nearly 72 years of age, and I have been in a prison or institution for all but eight or ten years of my life. So I would know a bit about Christmas lunch in the prison system.

A couple of months ago I began attending education here and found a program called “BK SB”, which brings students’ ability to manage English and maths up to scratch.

I just read issue 5 November 2024. There was an article titled “Bodies in Cages: Trans Experiences in Prison”. Being a trans woman myself, I wanted to share my story of experience in custody.

Look at the bare roofs across our jails, put some solar panels on all of them and turn them all into power stations, effectively reducing power bills everywhere!

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Help us get About Time off the ground. All donations are tax deductible and will be vital in providing an essential resource for people in prison and their loved ones.
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