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When Power Writes the Headlines: Media and State Collusion

Writer's picture: Tabitha LeanTabitha Lean

 

I have a pretty shitty memory. It’s the PTSD. It’s fucked with my long-term recall. I can’t remember dates or specifics of events. I can’t tell you how many times my kids have said, “Mum, remember when…” and I have absolutely no recollection of the event. But one thing I do remember with some clarity was a moment in April 2014. I remember hearing a bang on my door. It roused me from my sleep, and suddenly, a gang of cops invaded my room, like a bunch of swarming ants. It was a shock. I was bleary eyed and not quite awake when they bustled me out of bed, still in my nighty, and started rifling through all my possessions. I didn’t quite know what was going on at first. Everything was blurry – the Seroquel fog of mornings[1] – you kind of wake up hung over. I remember asking at one point whether I could go to the toilet and get dressed. They allowed me but escorted me to the bathroom and watched me get changed. Before I knew it, I was in the back of a police car, sitting next to a detective, on my way to the holding cells. As I arrived at the cop shop ready to be fingerprinted, photographed, and formerly charged, there was a large media contingent waiting for me. I stepped out of the car and walked through what felt like a rugby scrum of cameras with a cop either side of me. That night the story of my arrest was all over the evening news. There isn’t a single person on this planet who could convince me that the media and the police are not in a marriage of convenience.

 

The media loves “criminals.” We provide them with a steady stream of material to fill their papers and news sites. Time and again, they single out one of us, and run an exposé that publicly attacks us for our past crimes. People lap up that sensationalised shit, relishing in a tell all peep show into the deepest, darkest moments of someone’s life. Too often, the media insist on taking it just that bit further (because public humiliation is not enough for these hacks) and they insinuate that we’re “back at it again,” by stoking public fear and reinforcing harmful stereotypes with their innuendo, suspicion, and tired stereotypes about women with criminal records, specifically Aboriginal women. They weaponise our criminal histories to erode our credibility and humanity. Sometimes they even rely on and quote unnamed, or at least unreliable sources to justify their accusations; yet the irony is, if these sources truly believed any of their lies, or so called concerns or hunches, they would have taken them to the police, not to a journalist or plastered them across a social media site.

 

The old, “do the crime, do the time,” is a nifty saying that people love to roll off their tongue, but for nearly all of us, that time never truly ends. On release we get caught in purgatory, a separator realm, a state of perpetual punishment where we are relentlessly drawn back to the worse thing we have ever done, or said, or been. The public attacks come at us despite us having served our sentences, gaining employment, paying our taxes, contributing to our communities, caring for our children, and reinventing our lives. Because none of what we do is actually good enough. We will never be good enough again. No matter what we do, it will never be enough to counteract the enduring narrative that people like us, criminalised people, cannot escape our past. As their articles spin their narratives of doubt, suspicion, and condemnation of us, the shadow of our convictions looms large, as if to say that a woman with a criminal record can never be “redeemed”. We can never reinvent ourselves; we can never be anything other than what the tabloids and their headlines say we are.

 

It all boils down to that criminal record with us. The fixation on that moment in time, as if we have lived no other life, but the “offending” years. I spoke to a formerly incarcerated woman the other day who is struggling to find employment. Her parole officer is insisting she disclose her criminal record at every interview. Worse still, the officer has implied that non-disclosure of her record is somehow an indication that she is being deceptive or dishonest, despite there being no legal or moral requirement for anyone to broadcast their past convictions in every aspect of their life. The notion that criminalised people must be open books—forever defined by their past mistakes—ignores the fundamental right to privacy and the right to move on. This insistence that this woman, or anyone with a criminal record, must weave their past into every corner of their present is a form of perpetual punishment. It denies the possibility of redemption, forces individuals to carry the weight of public judgment indefinitely and reduces them to a single dimension. This woman is not just her conviction; she is a person of many layers—someone who has rebuilt her life, contributes meaningfully to her community, and deserves to be seen as more than the sum of her mistakes. Besides, for many of us, me included, our cases are extremely high profile, our lives a magazine anyone can thumb through since our arrest, if anyone thinks there is some grand cover up being orchestrated by us, they really have not been paying attention.

 

This relentless pull back to our conviction, demanding it be a feature of our everyday lives, even in the free world, ironically makes a compelling argument for abolition. When media figures and the politicians who capitalise off these narratives, insist that people with a criminal record forever wear the stain of their conviction, they expose a glaring contradiction: they don’t actually believe in the rehabilitative potential of prisons or the redemptive capacity of punishment. If they did, our efforts to rebuild our lives—our work in the community, our thriving businesses, our contributions to those in need—would be celebrated as evidence of transformation, not weaponised against us. Instead, their actions reinforce the truth abolitionists have long argued: the carceral system is not designed to rehabilitate or redeem but to punish indefinitely, to control, and to stigmatise. In doing so, they expose the carceral state for what it truly is—an institution that thrives on dehumanisation and the denial of second chances.

 

However, the stories they run on us are just emblematic of a broader issue: how media sensationalism and state power intertwine to prop up the prison industrial complex. Criminalised women, especially those from marginalised communities, are continually targeted, dehumanised, and publicly shamed by a media eager to profit from crime stories and a state eager to justify its punitive policies. This is not just a personal attack on us individually—it is a systemic one, designed to perpetuate a narrative that criminalised people are irredeemable, ensuring they remain locked out of society long after they have served their time. The media’s complicity in this process cannot be understated.

 

Each story is not isolated; they are part of a larger ecosystem of fearmongering and criminalisation. True crime narratives dominate our screens, with sensationalised coverage that reinforce the myth of “dangerous offenders” lurking around every corner. These narratives are gendered and racialised, with women often reduced to stereotypes—manipulative temptresses or conniving criminals—and racialised people depicted as inherently dangerous.

 

And the harm goes beyond the headlines. Articles remain online indefinitely, ensuring that the “worst thing” someone has done becomes their permanent identity. With a single Google search, criminalised people find themselves unable to secure housing, employment, or even rebuild personal relationships. The digital scarlet letter locks us out of the very resources we need to move forward, perpetuating cycles of poverty, exclusion, and punishment.

 

I know this all too well. I have a criminal conviction for fraud – 48 counts of it to be precise. This has locked me out of both the housing market and the labour market since my release from prison. Worse, it has haunted my interpersonal relationships for the past decade. I cringe when I remember lovers’ faces as they “discover” who I am before I’ve had a chance to tell them, family members of partners who size me up to see if they can trust me, and people who hold their purses just that little bit closer when they realise there is a “criminal” in their midst. It’s disheartening, and I used to feel ashamed, but these days I mostly feel anger and pity. Pity for those that judge us, because in the judging and exiling of us, they are missing out on our contributions, our brilliant contributions. But I am not naïve. The power of the media’s vitriol almost stopped me writing this blogpost. I know what may come with its publishing: an onslaught of abuse, attempts to “out” me, to “expose my crimes,” to reduce me to a caricature of my past. The power and brutality of that inevitability was almost enough to silence me. But retreating into darkness is not the answer. Cowering in their shadows will not change a thing. Standing up to their bullying, refusing to let their lies define me or those in my community—that is where change begins. Standing shoulder to shoulder with my criminalised kin, we find strength in each other, and together we expose them for the thugs they truly are. They cannot diminish us when we refuse to disappear quietly into the night.


But some do get to slink quietly into the night. Some are granted the privilege of anonymity, quietly integrating back into society without the constant glare of public judgment. I think of several people, me included, who have faced high-profile cases in this country—many of us whose faces have been splashed across papers, whose names became synonymous with scandal. Yet, some have managed to move on, carving out a semblance of normality. Their participation in so-called "civil society" accepted because they have moulded themselves into perfectly palatable, sanitised figures. They are deemed more acceptable—nice, contrite, and non-threatening to the status quo. When I examine this group, it’s clear to me that their acceptance hinges on their collusion with carcerality and compliance with the colonial state. It’s about aligning themselves with the systems that criminalised them in the first place, proving their loyalty to a framework that thrives on punishment and control. But beyond that, there’s a racial element at play here too. The ones who are allowed to quietly disappear, who are afforded the chance to rebuild their lives without relentless scrutiny, are often those who fit into the mould of whiteness or proximity to it. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t—those of us who are Indigenous or otherwise racialised—are continuously dragged back, our reintegration stories overshadowed by a colonial logic that refuses to see us as anything but criminal. This is why the media's obsession with some criminalised people feels so vicious. It’s not just about punishing the past actions—it’s about ensuring that some people, particularly racialised women, remain locked in a perpetual state of being criminalised, regardless of the time they’ve served or the changes they’ve made. It’s about upholding a system that works hand in glove with racial animus to decide who gets a second chance and who remains shackled to their worst moment.


What might be even worse, though, is witnessing the betrayal during these witch hunts. Among the same grouping of criminalised people, some actively engage in the media takedown of the criminalised person who is featured in these exposes. They like, share, and even seem to revel in the spectacle, as though they take comfort in someone else being targeted, relieved that the spotlight isn’t on them (this time). But the truth is, they are fooling themselves if they think they’ve been fully welcomed into the “uncriminalised” class they so desperately perform belonging to. Even if they are invited into boardrooms, universities, or companies, they’ll never truly belong. This country’s fixation on permanent records ensures that no amount of contrition or compliance can shield them. And if the system can turn on one of us with such ferocity, it can—and will—turn on them the very moment they drop the mask of politeness and subservience, the second they stop performing the role of the sanitised, compliant "criminal." And where is the solidarity in all this? What happened to standing with our criminalised kin? What happened to the understanding that if one of us is attacked, all of us are? If we allow the system to pick us off one by one, there will be no one left to fight back. Solidarity isn’t just an abstract ideal—it’s a necessity for survival. It’s heartbreaking to see people who should know better abandon the fight, people and organisations who claim to be abolitionists participating in the same cycles of violence they supposedly stand against.


Ultimately, the media are handmaidens to the state. Election cycles come and we see a surge in crime coverage, as politicians and journalists work in tandem to whip up a “crime crisis” that justifies harsher policing, longer sentences, and the expansion of carceral infrastructure. We only have to look at the recent Queensland and Northern Territory elections for evidence of that. This collusion reinforces the colonial carceral state, where prisons serve not as places of rehabilitation but as sites of racialised and gendered violence, punishing the most marginalised in our society.

 

My Dad always says, ‘there will be a reckoning’ - and the problem of media/state collusion definitely requires one. It’s time to break the cycle. It’s time to hold the media accountable for its role in upholding a system that thrives on fear, exclusion, and the dehumanisation of criminalised people. It means moving away from clickbait and profit-driven narratives. It means examining how racial and gender biases shape reporting. It means giving space to voices that challenge the prison industrial complex, particularly those of formerly incarcerated people and communities most impacted by the carceral state. Until then, we need to confront the fact that the media remains an accomplice to the prison industrial complex—a willing partner that continues to uphold systems of oppression while profiting from the suffering they cause.

 

It’s time to demand a media that informs rather than harms, that uplifts rather than destroys. It’s time to dismantle the narratives that keep the prison industrial complex alive and start telling the stories that set us free.

 

Women like us are not society's failures—we are its future.


 


[1] High doses of Seroquel (quetiapine), an atypical antipsychotic, are known to cause significant sedation due to their antihistaminergic effects. This sedative property often leads to a heavy, drowsy feeling shortly after taking the medication. Upon waking, individuals may experience a "hangover-like" sensation, characterized by grogginess, lethargy, and mental fog, as the residual sedative effects linger while the body metabolizes the drug. These side effects can be more pronounced in higher doses or when the medication is taken at irregular times.

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