Kerry Tucker's inspirational story after seven years in jail

THE BIG READ: Australian mother Kerry Tucker emerged from seven years in jail with a mission to help others and an eye on Hollywood.

Kerry Tucker who has turned her life around after spending seven years in jail.

NONE of the well-heeled ladies sipping coffee in the cafe would guess the brunette beside them was once considered one of Australia's worst female crooks.

With her pintucked suit and perfect manicure, Kerry Tucker cuts an impressive figure, and yet it wasn't so long ago the mum from Healesville, Victoria, was locked up in the notorious Dame Phyllis Frost maximum security prison, alongside criminal names such as Mokbel, Moran and Herman.

In 2004, Tucker was sentenced to seven years' jail after pleading guilty to stealing $2 million from her employer. It was one of the largest white-collar crimes committed by a woman in Australia.

But rather than break her, prison made her, and this modern-day Eliza Doolittle has gone from prisoner to PhD student.

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Today, Tucker is a Swinburne University lecturer, accomplished author, highly sought-after motivational speaker and ambassador for the charity Wear For Success. She is a passionate advocate for educating women in prison and was recently appointed to the Victorian Government's Women's Correctional Services Advisory Committee.

Kerry Tucker: Allow dads to have their children with them in prison

Kerry Tucker who has turned her life around after spending seven years in jail.

The story of how she rebuilt her shattered life is in the hands of Hollywood producers and her experience behind bars is the inspiration behind Wentworth, the critically acclaimed remake of the much-loved Australian drama series Prisoner.

"Being in prison has made me a better person,'' Tucker says, "and I wouldn't change it for anything. Apart from the time away from my daughters, it's a journey that I've been privileged to be involved in. I'm not proud of what I've done or why I went to jail, but I can't change the past: it's who I am and I have to embrace it and use the experience to make something of my life."

The former head of women's prisons, Brendan Money, says: "In 27 years working in prisons, I haven't come across any prisoner quite like Kerry.

"She used her time in prison so effectively she not only changed her life, but left a legacy that has changed the lives of many other women since."

The moment of truth will be forever etched in Kerry Tucker's memory.

It was 6am on a cold winter's morning when six police officers came looking for her at the local gym. The game was up.

The mother of two with a seemingly perfect life in Healesville willingly confessed to years of siphoning off money from her employer's accounts, in total almost $2 million.

The crime shocked the township. On the face of it, Tucker was a well known, happily married mother with a nice house and good job. But in reality, she was stuck in a desperately unhappy marriage, struggling for money to support her two small daughters.

She says that the money she stole from her employer, the local logging mill, gave her some control over her life and helped ``keep up appearances'' when in fact her world was falling apart.

"When the offending was at its worst I was taking a lot of money," she admits. "I gave most of it away because it made me feel good to help other people. I even took a group of friends on a holiday. It was a `nice' way of covering up a very big black hole in my life, but it was the wrong thing to do.

"I made a huge mistake out of the desire to be happy and I've paid the price. I have enormous remorse for all of the people that were affected, but I couldn't change what I'd done, so I made the conscious decision to do the best I could going forward."

Tucker was sentenced to seven years' jail, all of which was spent in maximum security in one of Australia's toughest jails, but prison had an unexpected, profound influence on her and gave her life a sense of purpose she could have never predicted. She found her calling.

"I went from being a suburban mother of two to being prisoner number 171435; my life as I knew it was completely gone. I thought my life was over. I had the choice to give in to the shame and fall into a deep, dark abyss of failure that I had created, or I could fight back, and I chose to fight - I owed it to my girls."

Tucker asked prison managers if she could study at her own expense, and she encouraged other offenders to come to classes with her. She achieved a Masters of Writing and became the first Australian inmate to undergo a graduation ceremony behind bars. While incarcerated she wrote a children's book to help families understand what happens when mum goes to jail _ the book is still used by corrections officers and welfare agencies - and she became a peer educator assisting new prisoners make the transition to life behind bars.

"She encouraged a culture of education in the prison, which had a significant impact on the health and well-being of the prisoners," Money says. "There are women who turned their lives around because she made them feel that they could learn. Some women who could not read or write, who had been in and out of jail all of their lives, began to learn, and that's a remarkable achievement."

Tucker's work mentoring women was so impressive that, after her release, she was invited to join the Women's Correctional Services Advisory Committee. She is passionate about offenders using prison time productively and is advocating for an overhaul of the parole program so prisoners do the programs they are obliged to do on parole while they are actually in jail.

"In prison they spend their days making toilet rolls or doing menial jobs. That time would be better spent working on development, change, education, counselling and becoming better people.

"When a woman leaves prison, she should be the best she can possibly be so she's ready to face the world. Every woman I met in jail had been raped at least two or three times; these women are very vulnerable and this is the time you can make a significant, positive impact on their lives."

She is at pains to point out that this doesn't mean women prisoners are getting an easy ride or access to privileges they don't deserve.

"Your punishment is your loss of freedom and that's huge - you pay the price. Life goes on around you while you are stuck in time. When I went in, text messaging had only just begun, petrol was 60 cents a litre, I'd never seen an iPad. From the day a woman enters prison, we should be working towards getting her ready for release so we reduce the potential for reoffending."

She cautions, however: "This won't work for all prisoners. There are some major offenders who are never going to change their behaviour and I know of some who are due for parole soon who are in no way ready to be back in the community."

Tucker spent hours writing detailed journals of her life in jail, partly she says to keep sane and fill the time. The huge volumes of heartbreaking and at times hilarious anecdotes are in the hands of Hollywood script writers, and she has been signed to the exclusive Manotti Jenkins agency in Chicago who are negotiating for her story to become a cable network mini-series.

"Prison in its own way can be a very humorous place - in a dark way,'' she says, sharing the story of a young offender who'd been caught at the airport trying to smuggle drugs in her stomach.

"She'd swallowed them and the X-ray showed her stomach was full of them and she had to go to hospital and have surgery to have them all removed, which of course the police filmed.

"When she arrived at prison I said to her, `How are you feeling?', and she said, `I'm OK, a little sore from the operation, but I'll be out soon, I'm not guilty and they've got nothing on me'. All I could say was, `Good luck with that!'"

It is Tucker's raw honesty and her ability to laugh at herself and the sometimes surreal world of life behind bars that appealed to the writers of Wentworth.

Tucker became a script consultant and played an integral role in the authenticity of the characters, their experiences, the language and even how the prisoners looked. The lead character, Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack), bears an uncanny resemblance.

Danielle Cormack as Bea Smith in an episode of TV drama .

"I was very in tune with the women in prison. They gave me the best possible life education you could have and I was conscious of this series portraying life in jail accurately. There's a lot of good women in prisons who've made bad mistakes and I felt a huge responsibility to portray them properly. Wentworth will reflect the dynamics of prison life, warts and all.''

But amid all of the hype of Hollywood and talk of blockbuster TV series, it's her girls that are keeping her grounded. Her daughters, Sarah, 16, and Shannyn, 18, were just five and seven when Tucker was jailed, and it was the thought of one day being reunited with them that kept her going through the darkest days. She says she owes it to them to make the best of her life now.

"They were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,'' Tucker says. ``So many people say `a mother's bond can never be broken' but that's not true; a mother's love can't be broken, but the day-to-day bond of life certainly can.

"I had to re-carve a role for myself with my girls because their lives had gone on without me and I had to find a place with them. I promised my girls when I got out that I would make them proud again and every day since my release that's what I've endeavoured to do.

``I'm not the person I was when I left Healesville; that's what a prison sentence is for. I did my time, I paid my dues and I'm a changed person now. I'm focused on rebuilding my life. Prison doesn't define who you are going to be for the rest of your life. I would hold my head up high now; I've paid the price.

"Five years ago when I walked out of prison, I had nothing and I was so frightened,'' she says, "I had no home, no car, no job. So I never imagined I'd be doing all of this today. But since my release I've been given many opportunities to rebuild my life and I'm embracing every one of them. I hope that my story can change the lives of women who may be vulnerable.''