Video above: Life on the dole - how do you survive on $40 a day?
I broke into my first house at age seven. And by the time I was a teenager I was using and dealing drugs.
I grew up surrounded by crime, poverty, abuse, desolation and social exclusion. I was nine when I saw my brother’s head being put through a wall. He was 11. There were more pedophiles and various forms of trauma than I can count. I was severely traumatized, homeless, expelled from school and using hard drugs by 14.
I witnessed far more violence than most would in a lifetime. We faced intermittent homelessness and instability that left me unable to form connections, peer groups.
I saw my father arrested, beaten up, and imprisoned; my mother institutionalized for mental health issues, throwing us into the system of intermittent foster care. My brother was in and out of court from the legal age of culpability. He always packed his bag ‘just in case’ he went straight to prison.
It was not through any fear of punishment that I stopped offending.
If harsher penalties prevented offending we should see lower rate of crime in places with the death sentence. But we don’t.
I was lucky, so lucky, that I wasn’t forced to serve time in juvenile detention. I only need to look within my own family to see how that would have made things worse.
At 21, after numerous hospital admissions for suicide attempts, overdose and self harm, I started receiving the mental and social health help I direly needed for the trauma spectrum disorders and homelessness I suffered.
I was able to start to recover.
The support workers around me got it. Their aim was to actually prevent harm occurring rather than simply reacting after the fact. They saw my behaviour as a health problem.
I was lucky to get a fantastic youth worker, access to therapy, housing, and drug and alcohol treatment. This kind of service provision was vital for me to deal with the adversity I was born into. Without service provision I would have had no way to deal with trauma, substance abuse, or homelessness.
I can only wonder at what else could have been prevented, or I could have achieved, had there been earlier intervention - particularly as a child.
If my single father, struggling with his own issues, or my schizophrenic mother, had got the health care he so desperately needed, things would have been totally different.
Without the service provision to facilitate reintegration I would not be writing this article today.
Through support from youth services I got my life back on track. I graduated from university with high distinction, and went on to a lot of work with my community in addressing these very issues.
It was adequate service provision that broke the cycle of offending in my life; not harsher sentencing laws.
The link between extreme trauma, abuse, poverty, adversity and offending is clear and yet our governments insist on spending more on prison beds than community services.
There is inadequate funding to mental health, housing and other vital services needed to be a healthy productive member of society.
For example, The Age revealed that the Victorian state government is spending more than $1.6 billion a year on its prisons. Tough law and order measures by Labor and Coalition governments have seen Victoria’s prison numbers soar, with the female prison population growing 140 per cent in the past decade. And to pay for growing prison numbers, the government announced a record $1.8 billion in new capital spending on prison infrastructure over for years.
The same government promised one thousand public houses, at a cost of $200 million when we have a wait list of over eighty-eight thousand, growing at five hundred a month.
There is very little evidence that harsher prison sentencing reduces offending. Yet there is ample evidence from across the globe that providing people with opportunities, to addressing health issues and providing housing increases their productivity in society and prevents crime.
We can’t arrest our way out of social responsibility.
Without the services I needed I would have had no chance of escaping that life and there is little doubt I would be another statistic in prison.
