Welcome to About Time
About Time is a high quality, non-partisan media organisation that publishes the voices of Australia’s incarcerated population and provides a window into the concealed world behind bars.
Our Values
We place lived experience voices at the centre of everything we do. To ensure our content is as relevant and effective as possible, it is primarily produced with the words and advice of people who are currently or were formerly in prison.
We publish high-quality, non-partisan material. We work with our storytellers to ensure that their content is powerful and effective. We take the side of the public interest rather than interest groups or political parties.
We value collaboration. We work within the criminal justice sector, in which dozens of community organisations seek to improve the lives of people affected by incarceration. As much as possible, we work with these organisations to have the greatest impact.
Why We Exist
Australia has a record high prison population; a population that is overwhelmingly disadvantaged and increasingly isolated from the rest of society. People in prison have little or no access to the internet, few news sources and limited opportunities for self-expression. By providing Australia’s incarcerated population with a voice and a source of connection, we seek to alleviate some of the immense isolation of the prison environment.
By design, the realities of prison are concealed from the outside world, which leads to the dehumanisation of Australia’s prison population and misinformation about incarcerated people and what goes on inside. We seek to combat false narratives and educate free society about life behind bars.
Our Impact
We seek to improve the lives of people in prison in Australia.
We provide:
- a voice and an outlet for expression
- an opportunity for connection
- a sense of hope
- a reliable, trustworthy source of news and accurate information
- a source of entertainment and distraction.
We seek to engender empathy and humanity from the outside world for people in prison.
We seek to provide a reliable, trustworthy source of news and investigations on the criminal justice system.
About the paper
About Time launched in July 2024.
The newspaper is published and distributed free of charge each month to 96 prisons across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. The paper is also freely available online, and available in-print to people on the outside via a paid subscription.
The majority of the paper’s content is written by currently and formerly incarcerated people. The centrepiece of the paper is the Letters section, which contains the letters that people in prison send to About Time’s mailbox every day. These letters are wide-ranging: they are life stories and reflections, regrets and dreams for the future. They are poems, works of fiction and artworks. They are grievances about prison life and stories of hope amidst the darkness. And they are feedback for us – for About Time – about their thoughts on their paper.
The paper also contains longer Experience pieces written primarily by formerly incarcerated people. There are hard-hitting news stories and lengthy investigations about prisons and the criminal justice system. There is vital information from experts about legal rights, health, education and reintegration opportunities. There is a dedicated section for Mob, plus poems, puzzles, comics, sport and other cultural reports, and more.
The paper is currently a 28-page colour monthly, with a potential audience of 40,000 people in prison and many thousands more in the wider community.
Online-only content
Through our website, our newsletter and our social media platforms, we have an opportunity to publish and share additional content. This might be content unsuitable for the newspaper, content rejected by Corrections authorities, or content in non-written forms.
We publish breaking news stories regularly on our website and we have begun to experiment with video content as a powerful way to share stories.
As the Prison Journalism Project writes: “To shift the narrative, we must change the storytellers.”
People who have experienced prison life are best placed to write about those experiences, yet they often lack the skills to tell their stories and report on the news effectively. We have begun to run workshops – both in and outside prison – to train currently and formerly incarcerated people, and others who may be impacted by incarceration, to tell their stories effectively, and to report on the criminal justice system.
We hope to expand this significantly, going into prisons around the country and running large workshops in the wider community, to create a network of people with lived experience who can contribute in a meaningful and powerful way to the discourse.
As Freedom Reads writes, “In an environment where the freedom to think, to contribute to a community, and even to dream about what is possible is too often curtailed”, the power of the book is almost limitless.
People in prison have varying and sporadic access to libraries, depending on their security status and depending on the staffing numbers in their wing and in their prison. We want to ensure that all people in prison have access to a wide range of books – access that isn’t impinged because of things outside their control.
We can do that through various means including:
- collecting and donating tens of thousands of books to dozens of prison libraries
- building beautiful, handcrafted bookcases into prison wings, transforming cellblocks into Freedom Libraries
- hosting bookclubs for people in prison and encouraging people inside to host their own.
We are inspired by the hugely successful Ear Hustle podcast, which brings the daily realities of life inside prison, shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.
We are in awe of the UK Prison Radio Association and its National Prison Radio, a 24/7 radio station for people in prison, made my people in prison.
We are constantly reminded by the power of storytelling. One of the best examples of this is The Moth and its live events around the world. We want to host live events, sharing the compelling stories of formerly incarcerated people, told with power and impact.
