Kutcha Edwards
20 Years on the Inside
Beyond the Bars is a live radio broadcast that gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmates in Victorian prisons space to share their opinions, stories, poems and songs, connecting them to culture and community. This six-episode podcast series, hosted by Vickie Roach and Kutcha Edwards, was created to celebrate Beyond the Bars’ twentieth year. A good place to start is the first episode: 'White Man’s World, Black Man’s Jail'.
Vickie Roach: I was institutionalised as a kid, and I understand what it’s doing and why it gets done. It’s to remove you from any connection to, you know, if you’re supposedly hanging around with the wrong crowd. What it does is, well, it makes you – being institutionalised – reliant on the system itself. You can’t sustain life without it. So it becomes a business for the people involved...'You build it, we’ll service it, and we’ll keep these no-gooders to one side, away from society.' But society is the problem.
You can visit 3CR Community Radio’s website for recordings of this year’s Beyond the Bars broadcasts (the last one aired earlier today). Past years are archived there as well.
(Related listening: where are you today by the Manus Recording Project Collective, recommended by past guest editor Jon Tjhia.)