This Brett Collins is very active down under. He also organises Freedom For Drug War Prisoners. The campaign bus travels around NSW, with campaigners openly smoking cannabis - including parking up to smoke outside prisons.
Briefly married (early 80s) to the activist Irina Dunn who coined the phrase 'a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle'. ('Borrowed' by Gloria Steinen then U2.)
Following from one of his own campaign pages:
Brett is the managing director of Breakout Press, driving force behind the Sydney based prisoner action group, Justice Action, and a legend in NSW jails. As a young father and Wollongong university student he had been arrested as an accessory to an armed hold-up in which a police officer had been shot, hand cuffed to a chair and beaten throughout a night by the investigating police, verballed and convicted and sentenced to 17 years jail.
Long sessions of solitary confinement and many more bashings in jail had quelled neither his great spirit nor his burning sense of injustice. A boxer with a fast eye, wit and grit, his presence signals he will always give as good as he gets and never give up. After a time - of which he had plenty - the prison officers, he told me, decided negotiation with Brett was more productive than intimidation and Brett became a leader of prisoners on the inside until his release in the early 1980s. He has been an active campaigner for prisoner rights ever since.
Are we sure this isn't the Brett Collins?
