Break The Cycle
"Just locking people up is not the answer."
"Just locking people up is not the answer."
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Sophie Wren
Age 26
"I own a cleaning business and I have a half-sister with a criminal record for a minor crime. In this situation, I tend to think of myself as two different people - a business woman and a caring sister. My sister's story is one of constant frustration and disappointment; because of her criminal record she finds it really difficult to find work and improve her quality of life. The hardest part of surviving without an income is the temptation of re-offending as she sometimes feels there are no other options. Personally, I understand where she is coming from. Without employment, she would FEEL she has nothing to lose and little purpose (I emphasize 'feel' here because I know she does have things to lose but when someone is feeling desperate their judgment is not clear).
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My sister has contacted me numerous times for a job with my company. I want to help and I care for her deeply but I also have a business to protect. Unfortunately, I understand that clients would never accept her past and it could damage the reputation I've spent the last five years building. I have offered her commercial jobs which would allow her to work alongside me, however to this date she hasn't been able to accept because of her reporting conditions. I have written letters asking for some flexibility on her conditions regarding employment but the board wouldn't consider it. It is incredibly frustrating! I want to believe in a system that encourages rehabilitation...I mean, wouldn't employment (under supervision) help her rejoin society? It's something I struggle to understand.."
Greta Levy
Age 21
"I completely agree with that notion that it is hard to shed off the 'criminal' skin once convicted. Admittedly, We don't help the case - if someone mentioned that they were prior convicted I couldn't say confidently that I would maintain my regular manner. I think integration into a community would really help - doing things that are community based to help create a friendship base that most need after incarceration."
Ann Wilcox
Age 66
"In order to succeed at anything you have to believe the job is worth doing. Nobody is going to attempt a useless task. We need to convince the justice system that people, caught up in it have worth."
Anonymous.
Ex-criminal
(approx. 14 years served)
"The whole system is shot. You have a court system so clogged up with 'holding cells' which can be used on average 3-4 weeks to be then placed in a prison that is full. The war on drugs is just filling prisons, it's almost all drug-related! It’s madness! The whole world needs to realize you can’t give 30-40 years for a fucking drug offense, it isn’t going to work. If they are looking for answers, the war on drugs has affected our judicial system from the courts, to the judges, to the inmates. If they are looking for answers, they need to drop this system and start again. I have been committing offenses long before being introduced to marijuana."
Dylan Noronha
Age 25
"Our criminal justice system is flat out broken. Not for those who have done hard crimes and are serving long sentences, those men and women deserve to be locked in confinement for an extended period. I'm talking about low-level criminals who are serving shorter sentences in our prisons.
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Prisons claim to reduce crime, improve society and rehabilitate prisoners for their release back into real world. Yet how can that be when we are locking prisoners in an environment which is so distant from the real world? It actually makes it harder to rejoin society, and easier to recommit crimes. To this day, we send people who have committed minor offenses to be locked up in large cell blocks, where they are allowed only a few hours a day to exercise in the yard while the rest is spent inside a concrete building. How can one possibly expect to spend years in this type of environment and then once released, rejoin society smoothly and efficiently. It's so counter productive.
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Incarceration rates along with the black mark of a criminal record is a national crisis. With many of these sentences reflecting drug use and/or distribution, Australia and frankly most of the world, are engaged in this so called "war on drugs". They (the Government) claim that the war on drugs saves lives when in actual fact majority of the time it does the exact opposite.
Police will arrest someone for carrying a couple caps of MDMA (ecstasy) , or a joint and then send that person to court. At court they'll receive a section 10 if lucky, though most of the time they'll receive a criminal record for something which isn't even illegal in like 10 countries. Giving someone a criminal record for something so small can only have one result, and that is ruining their lives. They no longer can travel to certain countries, will find it hard to get a job and will forever have an asterisks next to their name because they were going to smoke a joint with some friends and watch a movie.
I believe the first port of call for Australia is to decriminalize drugs by following the same model as Portugal. This has been proven to lower incarceration levels, lower the deaths by OD, reduce overall crime and reduce the unemployment rate."
Madison Chatham
Age 20
"It saddens me that the Aboriginal community is often vilified. In my own social circle, I often hear little pieces of prejudice that seep through general conversation. I believe that stereotyping Indigenous Australians as low-educated, violent alcoholics is a really cruel and misleading representation of their culture as a whole.
When I was very young, perhaps only five or six years old, my mum and I traveled back to the Aboriginal mission she grew up on as her father was the principle of their only school. Mum had moved to Kiama at the age of eleven, so she was not expecting anyone to remember her - a woman now with her own daughter. It was a long journey and as an active kid, I couldn't wait to jump out of the car. I leaped over a fence and began jumping on someone's trampoline. Mum began to go red with embarrassment and insisted I get off immediately. Suddenly two men came out of the small house and walked up to mum. She began apologizing and explaining how far we had come but half way through her explanation the men stopped her, "Hi Nina, how have you been." The men had remembered my mother by her nickname after almost 35 years of separation. To me that speaks volumes about their culture and the value they hold for their loved ones. My mum and her family are truly blessed to be known as 'white black-fellers' in that community."
Kayla Chapman
Age 21
"I forget which country it is (maybe Sweden or Norway?) but their justice system seems like the perfect answer to dealing with criminals that will be sent back into society. Their 'jails' are all about educating and training prisoners while they're inside so when they go back into society they have something to contribute. In Australia, it's inevitable that prisoners are going to form connections with other criminals, learn nothing other than how to be badder (for want of a better word) and have nothing else to contribute to society when they get out. So it creates this downward spiral where there's really no hope of them having a better life - when all they're original crime was probably something minor like drug possession or theft. Of course, murderers, rapists etc. should be dealt entirely differently (I wish they actually had tougher punishments than they do)."
Kurtis Hughes
Age 20
"The criminal justice system, in my mind is inherently flawed. Before I start, I'd like to make it clear that i am in no way an expert on this issue, and don't intend to convey that message, this is merely my opinion. At the core of the justice system, the main fundamental role that it serves is to create a division between those in society who abide by a set of laws, and those who do not. This binary is established in order to protect people from those who have done 'wrong' in a particular realm of society. I agree with this. However, what i do not agree with is the lack of rehabilitative methods implemented so that offenders are able to see the wrong in their way and return to society.
The focus placed on 'doing time' not only reinforces particular prejudices that offenders have against the criminal law system, but also to a degree, cultures their resentment. This in turn leads to repeat offenders, or offenders who truly have no altered their ways and still pose a risk to society. Of course I am not saying that those who have murdered or raped should be simply 'rehabilitated' and entered back into society, because these are especially heinous crimes. But what i do believe is that a degree of relativity should be put in place with regard to individual, or umbrella cases, in order to allow offenders to amend their ways in whatever area that is (to an extent of course).
The lack of rehabilitative functions just jeopardizes chances of re-entering the world in a form that is compatible with the rest, but also just saps into tax payer dollars who have to pay for the increasing number of offenders who repeat their offences, or never truly see the error of their initial ways."