First Time in Prison
By Adam
If you feel like you’ve lost everything and have nothing to look forward to, it is very important that you don’t lose hope for your life.
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.
If you feel like you’ve lost everything and have nothing to look forward to, it is very important that you don’t lose hope for your life.
I’ve now been in for over a year – it’s my first (and last) time in. I still haven’t been sentenced but my lawyer has told me I’ll be doing a “substantial” sentence.
Why would anybody want to come back to the system and add to that statistic?
We have an active veterans’ affairs type meeting here every month and an outside group called “Buddy Up” that sends two of their volunteers in.
I’m only 23 years old but I feel like I’m 43. Being in prison definitely preserves your body but makes your mind and soul feel so much older if you know what I mean.
I’ve been in prison for 14 years now, and lockdowns have always been a feature of prison life, but I have also noticed that over the years they have gotten worse and worse.
Has anybody purchased a watch recently or in the past and wondered what happens when the battery dies?
My name is Greg, I am 60 years old and I have spent almost 48 years in various institutions and prisons.
We will all have our freedom one day, so until then keep your head up, you got this and take it one day at a time.
My name is Maude. I am a young Jabbir Jabbir woman – I was born in Broome, Western Australia.
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.
I don’t know your name, your story, or the road that brought you here but I do know this: you matter. Right now. Exactly as you are.

For me, a small amount of people and being in my cell overnight by myself is joyful to me.

I don’t know when or if this will be published but since my last published letter ‘Unjust Justice’, a lot has happened. It seems we have gone through so much and at the same time we still haven’t changed a bit.

Another thing to know about prison is that some beds are so short in jail that tall people have to sleep in the foetal position or bump their heads two feet at night.

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 have been incarcerated for 22 months of a four-year sentence in Queensland jails. This poem is about my own situation.

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 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!

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.

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?


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