No Second Chance: One Woman's True Story of Prison Life in Australia

No Second Chance is Maree French’s firsthand account of life as a female prisoner in the Queensland jail system. She tells the unvarnished truth about Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, an overcrowded hellhole where women were caged together in cells built for one, or in un-policed group units, where violence was the accepted mode of communication.

Prepare for raw images of life behind the razor wire, where frightened women, some incarcerated for unpaid parking fines, were locked down with killers and hardened criminals. Maree lived daily with meth addicts and drug mules, women who had tortured animals, murdered in cold blood, or committed fraud, but she quickly learned that the greatest crime inside a prison is ‘dogging’ – reporting a fellow-inmate to the authorities.
Witness the brutality, filthy conditions, lousy food, cruel treatment of traumatised and mentally unstable women, and the desperate reality of entrapment – away from nature, family and everything that makes life worth living. You will go even deeper withing the prison system, to peek behind the strip search curtain, the locked doors, inside the medical unit, the gym, and slave labour shed.

Meet the ancillary and medical staff, visiting teachers, Christian ladies out to save souls, and, of course, the prison guards – the kind, the indifferent, and the few who really cared. Oddly enough, prison officers spend more of their time in prison than many of the offenders; in some circumstances, a prison officer and inmate may spend up to sixteen years together … yet be forever separated by the uniforms they wear.

But No Second Chance has a lighter side. When the author is eventually moved to Numinbah, a low security prison farm, the relative freedom allowed a glimpse of the real personalities of women who had held their guard high in harsher conditions. As the inmates settle into an environment without fences, coiled wire, or relentless monitoring, the reader is treated to some of the funniest prison episodes on record and will meet the most intriguing characters ever to be locked up together.

This highly entertaining book is an eye-opener. No Second Chance dispels the myth that prisoners have it too easy, or that Australia’s nursing home residents would be better off in jail. Discover just how unrealistic TV prison dramas are … and perhaps – just perhaps – you might question the rehabilitative and moral value of prisons in contemporary society.