Meet our founder Tom Penglis, and who founded the WA Justice Association (WAJA) during his time at UWA Law School. Tom is an ex-prisoner and now lawyer, who is passionate about legal and social issues.
In August 2019 Tom was convicted of drug-related charges and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. Tom was released on parole in April 2020, and in November 2020 his full-term sentence expired. On a personal level, this experience was both extremely challenging and emotional, yet also offered an opportunity for Tom to reflect and grow as an individual.
On a broader level, Tom’s incarceration exposed him to the failings of WA’s criminal justice system as a means of effectively dealing with people who commit crimes and opened his eyes to the injustices that continue to plague our society; particularly the tremendous overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians at every step of the criminal justice system.
For most of Tom’s sentence, he worked in Acacia Prison’s Resettlement Office, a small department that linked prisoners with external support services, and managed many of the internal support services available to prisoners. Tom’s job included helping prisoners with problems relating to drivers’ licenses, identification, and drug and alcohol support, among other things. It was also Tom’s role to give the induction presentation to new inmates. In this role he learnt a lot about the problems facing prisoners in WA, and the availability (or lack thereof) of support services that could assist in solving these problems. It also put names and faces to those people so often villainised or reduced to statistics in discussions regarding criminal justice.
In this role Tom also helped prisoners structure and write their parole applications. This required the inmates to effectively tell him their ‘life stories’ and through these stories, it became apparent to him that the typical WA prisoner is a traumatised, damaged person in need of help, as opposed to an inherently bad person deserving of punishment.
Living with Indigenous inmates and listening to their stories during his time in prison was also an extremely edifying experience for Tom and it became very clear that no conversation regarding criminal justice reform can be tabled without reference to Indigenous issues and without the inclusion of Indigenous voices. For this reason, WAJA aims to include Indigenous decision-makers on our Board as well as in our project teams.
Through Tom’s experiences, he became aware that features of the WA justice system were ultimately failing our community and a punitive construct still primarily exists. Despite efforts to add rehabilitative elements to this punitive core, the outcomes achieved leave much to be desired. Too many people are being incarcerated. This fact has been made abundantly clear from reports by the Inspector of Custodial Services and Department of Correctional Services over recent years.
Tom founded WAJA with the hope is that students would be able to meaningfully contribute to this goal and effectively work towards improving WA’s justice system. WAJA’s vision is of a fair criminal justice system focussed on rehabilitation, which provides all Western Australians the support they need to turn their lives around, and where imprisonment is a genuine last resort.
Tom Penglis - WAJA Founder