Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW/ACT)

• Jailbaby follows the phenomenal success of Prima Facie, which scrutinised the law’s failure to protect female victims of sexual assault.
• Read more:
  In Suzie Miller's Prima Facie, theatre finds a voice of reckoning on sexual assault and the law

A life of struggle

• AJ has a long record of troubled behaviour, mostly property crimes, which has seen him spend time in juvenile detention.
• At 18, AJ is highly impressionable – even gullible – and under the thumb of some older, nastier criminals.
• When he needs $500 to go on a soccer trip he thinks will transform his life, he chooses the wrong way to get it.

Imagined sacred space

• The courtroom of the public imagination is like the last sacred space in a secular society.
• People readily imagine a defendant’s case will be carefully considered; that everybody has a lawyer in a sharp suit who will make eloquent pleas and ask searching questions.
• In reality, the lower courts are crowded and chaotic.
• A duty solicitor quoted in recent research paper likened the civil courts to a “zoo”.

Incarceration in Australia

• It happened long before AJ was born, when politicians decided locking up more – and younger – people made them popular.
• Even as the rate of offending in Australia has dropped, the prison rate has steadily climbed.
• Australia incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than China, Guatemala or the United Kingdom.
• The United States leads the world in per capita incarceration, but Australia has more people incarcerated who have not been tried or sentenced.

Ominous inevitability

• The level of detail written into these descriptions is risky, but this raw brutality is the play’s strength.
• One of the story strands is underdeveloped, and the middle-class characters (whose home AJ burgles) often feel like uncomfortable caricatures.
• An ominous inevitability ties the best parts of the play together.