For more than a year, Clybucca Dreaming volunteer director Tanya Keed has been providing support for Indigenous women who have fallen foul of the ACT criminal justice system.

Her women's "yarning circle", an informal chat group, operates inside the sterile walls of the prison, then continues when the women are paroled or released.

Once the women are released, she says the most important element is simply just being there; providing the sympathetic ear at the other end of the phone in the middle of the night, or being able to offer a reassuring hug and a cup of tea when someone hits "rock bottom".

"It's really tough for some of these girls," she said.

"They've never really known what it's like to have family support or stability.

"But when they are nurtured and supported, it's amazing to see how much they change and grow."

Ms Keed currently has 17 women in her Yarning Circles for Justice pilot program, and three months ago was given support by the ACT government to extend it for another three months.

She now has the confidence and the promising early results to tender for the ACT government's upcoming three-year contract, worth $450,000, which extends into complex areas of case management support and co-ordinating legal representation.

Upscaling will also bring its own administrative and resource challenges, as it will pitch her small, close-knit business against larger and well-established operations such as the Aboriginal Legal Service, which is the current contractor.

For clients like shy and softly spoken Samantha Campbell, 28, who left prison in January, the hands-on approach of "Aunty Tanya" and her team has made a huge difference to her life.

"I've been in and out of the justice system for about 15 years; I first went into Quamby [ACT's former youth detention centre] when I was pretty young," she said.

The first thing she lost was her self-esteem.

"I felt pretty depressed much of the time and started to go to the [yarning circles] sessions inside [prison]. Now I'm getting my confidence back bit by bit and I really feel now that things are turning around for me."

Corrections Minister Shane Rattenbury has a firm belief that programs like Ms Keed's yarning circles provide the pressure relief valve that the ACT criminal justice system and the overcrowded Canberra prison so desperately needs.

"We have made the deliberate decision not to grow the high-security part of the [Canberra] jail," Mr Rattenbury said.

"Instead that money will be committed to programs which help people get their lives back on track."

He said government bureaucracy wasn't set up for informal support programs such as this, "but we have to have the courage to jam it into the system and ... try to get it across the line".