How an academic journey has been shaped by personal experience

It was a simple and kind gesture from a prison TAFE teacher that set Dr Jennifer Nicholls on her academic journey and an at-times uncomfortable dive back into a subject that she experienced first-hand.

As her four-month incarceration in the minimum-security Tarrengower Prison in Maldon ended and she was leaving the facility, the teacher whispered in her ear, 'if you don't go to university, I'm going to be very upset with you'.

Dr Nicholls says the message was "ringing in my head" when considering her next steps. Not having completed her VCE, she thought applying to university would be futile but reasoned that the probability of getting a job with a criminal record might be an even greater obstacle. Despite the concerns she started the Bachelor of Humanities and Social Sciences in Semester 2 2014.

"I was very upfront with Federation University and said, 'look, I'm on parole, but this is what I want to do,' and I was accepted. When I started, I was very scared."

Dr Nicholls has recently completed her PhD thesis – Women's Experiences of Healthcare Pre, During and Post Incarceration in Victoria: Do They Reflect Human Rights and Throughcare Principles? The completion of the PhD is her latest achievement in a journey at Federation that has seen her progress from a Bachelor of Criminology before completing her honours (first-class) for both coursework and her thesis.

"I happened to pick up one of Marg's (Associate Professor Marg Camilleri) electives in Semester 1, 2015, and it was an Introduction to Criminology. And I got an HD for it, and I thought, 'Oh, this is interesting, I'm quite good at this'. I was getting credits and passes for the other subjects, so I had a chat with Marg and explained everything to her, and I said I was interested in swapping over to criminology.

"Marg said, 'well why not?' So I did, and it's all snowballed from that. It has been an incredible journey."

Dr Nicholls' latest research drew largely on her own experiences. She says the impetus behind her research for her honours and PhD was the lack of adequate healthcare that she received when in prison.

"I was only there for four months, but all women in Victoria, when they first go to prison, go to the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne, which is a maximum-security facility. So every woman goes there regardless of whatever they have done. That doesn't matter – that is the entry point for women," Dr Nicholls said.

"I was on a lot of medications, including anti-depressants, and I was taken off everything cold turkey, which is not a good thing. It took 11 days to get one medication back, and then I was transferred to the minimum security at Tarrengower, and some of these issues were sorted, but not all.

"It became clear that trying to access healthcare in the prison system can be ridiculous. There are excessive waiting times and that's been an ongoing issue since before I was there. It's been identified by the Ombudsman and yet it's still happening."

Deciding that she needed to act, Dr Nicholls contacted some of the women she had been in prison with and they agreed to participate in her work. There were her own doubts about sharing her story publicly, but she felt she couldn't "in all good conscience, ask women to share their very deeply personal healthcare experiences if I wasn't willing to share my own".

Dr Nicholls says her study shows that women are still experiencing difficulties with healthcare in the prison system.

"You've got to keep in mind that when talking about healthcare, when many women present to prison, many of them are in a poor state of health anyway, and the prison itself might be hampered by policies, funding issues and all sorts of things," she said.

"The women I spoke to said they just felt degraded. They felt like they weren't treated like humans and they were ignored. They weren't listened to and their health wasn't prioritised – it was all about security over health.

"The biggest finding, while I didn't find any significant breaches of human rights, was that the boundaries were being pushed in relation to equality, equivalency of care, and not being treated humanely."

Her study makes several policy-based recommendations and recommends training for prison staff on how to treat people with dignity and respect.

"Because that's what it's all about. Yes, they may have done the wrong thing, but they still deserve to be treated like humans," she said.

"I would love to do more research because it needs to be done. The interesting thing is, when I first went in, my mindset at the time was to suck it up because I did the wrong thing and this is what I deserve. I didn't have a clue that I had any rights at all, and if I had known, then I probably would've made a fuss about my healthcare." Dr Jennifer Nicholls

Her thesis also got the thumbs up from Corrections Victoria. With one of the women involved in the research on parole at the time, Dr Nicholls needed permission to interview her, and Corrections Victoria subsequently read the research.

For the moment, Dr Nicholls says she is proud of her accomplishments and is thankful for the support over the past 10 years.

"Marg has been with me right from the word go, encouraging me every step of the way and giving me that push and encouragement during times when I just wanted to quit because it was just too hard," she said.

"The support PhD students get from Fed Uni is great, and I was lucky enough to win a scholarship too for the first three years, so I'm thankful for being given the chance.

"What's incredible about it is that I didn't finish high school — I left at the end of year 10, and here I am in 2024, having been in prison, all this study and finally had my thesis accepted, and I've just had my doctorate confirmed. I just want to cry."

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In the 2024 Good Universities Guide, Federation University was ranked number one in Australia for Overall Education Experience in Law & Paralegal Studies owing to the excellent reputation of the Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice course. For more information on this course, visit https://www.federation.edu.au/courses/DHK5-Bachelor-of-Criminology-and-Criminal-Justice