Debbie Kilroy

As of 2021 she is principal of the law firm Kilroy & Callaghan, where she leads a team of five, and CEO of Sisters Inside. She is passionate about encouraging former offenders, and in particular Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and culturally diverse women to become criminal lawyers.

In April 2020 Kilroy contracted COVID-19 after travelling to the United States with her friend and colleague Boneeta-Marie Mabo, with both becoming so unwell that they were admitted to hospital. Around 18 months of contracting the virus, in September 2021, she was still suffering from Long COVID, with a debilitating range of symptoms.

In early 2019, she led a crowd-funding campaign called #freeher to pay off the court debts of Indigenous women in Western Australia who had been imprisoned for defaulting on fines, raising over A$400,000 and enabling the release of 11 women. Amendments to the WA legislation were passed in 2020, partly as result of the recommendation from the coronial inquiry into the death of Ms Dhu, who died in police custody.

Kilroy completed her legal training as well as a Graduate Diploma in Forensic Mental Health (she is trained in gestalt therapy), and in 2017 was the first former prisoner to be admitted as a legal practitioner by the Supreme Court of Queensland, a decision ruled by Justice Paul de Jersey, future chief justice and later governor of Queensland.

In November 2016 Kilroy was appointed to Queensland's Sentencing Advisory Council. She believes that the council has an important role to play in educating the public, to counteract the "law-and-order hysteria" seen in the media and spruiked by politicians.

Kilroy has served as an Executive Member of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties since 2001 and ex-officio chairperson of the Youth Affairs Network of Queensland since 1997 (As of 2019). She has also served a member of a number of other bodies and organisations, including:

During the three years that she served of her sentence before her release in 1992, she began training as a social worker through the University of Queensland, determined to improve the situation of women and children in prison.

In 1990, she witnessed her friend Debbie Dick being murdered in the overcrowded Boggo Road Gaol, and has said that "[her] commitment to fight against the criminalisation and imprisonment of women is in honour of her memory and the memories of all the women and girls who have died at the hands of the prison industrial complex". As a result of this murder, the prison authorities started involving prisoners in committees that helped to run the prison.

She had a child at the age of 18, and endured a violent relationship for some years. After leaving that relationship she met and in 1986 married her present husband, rugby league footballer Joe Kilroy, and they had a child together. Debbie was sentenced to six years in prison after having sold cannabis to undercover police.

Debbie Kilroy OAM (born 1961), née Deborah Harding, is an Australian human rights activist and prison reformer. She is known for having founded Sisters Inside, an independent community organisation based in Queensland, Australia, that advocates for the human rights of women and girls in the criminal legal system. She is a qualified lawyer, who in 2007 was the first person with serious convictions to be allowed to practise law by the Supreme Court of Queensland.

Deborah Harding was born in 1961 in Brisbane, and raised in the suburb of Kedron, Queensland. During her teens, she became rebellious, and, after being locked up at the age of 14 for a four-week psychiatric assessment, began a period of increasing criminalisation and imprisonment, with only brief periods out of the criminal justice system during her teens. Witnessing and being a victim of injustices within the system, her early experiences with it made her angry.