Why should we put up with having federal police, state police and lollypop police. But have we got it that bad? Spare a thought for the poor old Americans. They have federal, state, local and town police as well as police in almost every government department. alcohol, tobacco and firearms, customs and excise, internal revenue, the army, navy, air-force, marines and coast guard and even the postal service. Many States even forces them to have police in nearly every school, almost every classroom. Something like 2,000 different armed security forces soak up so much of the budget that the country spends more than it collects and the problem is increasing exponentially.
In Linton and surrounding towns we have but one policeman and the majority of the time that is sufficient. Australia has but only about 11 different armed security forces including its military. That average about one and a half for each state compared to an average of 40 in the America. Even little old, well organised Britain, supposedly sensible (except it is just now establishing States) has about 15 times more than us.
Complicating this minefield of jurisdictions is the fact that, as colonies, states still have to extradite criminals to each other and even from an airport to a local lock-up. What does that cost the taxpayer? At least we can be comfortable in the idea at that protecting us and our valuables is far greater than the crimes perpetrated upon us. We can pay up to $50,000 to process a criminal who has duped us for $5000. Is that sensible?
Maybe this is why in recent times a man went to court for failing to stop, trafficking ecstasy, theft of motor vehicle, disqualified licence, possess amphetamines, counterfeit cash, and a controlled weapon - a knife. He was sentenced to 6 months. Hardly a fair sentence given the number and gravity of the offences. It cost us about 30 grand to punish him. Even fare evasion can cost the taxpayer $500 to collect regardless of the price of the fare. Maybe what we spend on catching fare evaders would allow everyone to travel on public transport for free anyway. Add the prospect that evaded fares total more than the salaries for people to collect it. Does that make sense?
On a different note we might look at the wonderful work being done by our Human, Children’s, Family, Youth or Community Services. (They keep changing names to keep the printing industry in work) Does it make sense to cost the taxpayers upwards of $500,000 not to put people behind bars but to just in preparing them and training them to go into prison. Take note of the TV programmes, books and newspaper articles that mention the word ‘step’ or ‘foster’ or ‘state care’ in their stories. Why do care services for children exist and what good do they do when many children are safer running the streets than in foster care or group home situations.
Never for the life of me will I ever understand why adoption is not even in the vocabulary for Australian children any more. We have to adopt from overseas because we cannot adopt Australian children. Where adoption would suggest permanency within a structured family foster care only creates temporary non-permanent status on children which means they grow up never having any connection to a living soul. Once fostering is over that’s it buddy your on your own, with adoption you’ve got a Mum and Dad for life even if you don’t get on with them anymore. Foster care is illogically the worst of all options for children. What this creates initially is an unconnected unsupported individual who can’t even ring someone for personal advice. What they do get is a clerk with a rule book. What it creates in the long term is a crying prisoner in a cell contemplating suicide because they’ve just been raped by their cellmate.
Despite all the unmarried, gay, barren and childless social workers with all their professional training we still manage to stuff up the lives of children. I should know I worked with these weirdo’s for 25 years, I was a social worker myself. Try working with a female vegan lesbian that insisted that her dog was vegan as well. The poor mutt spent its whole time at work sucking up the kids dropped bits of hamburger like a vacuum cleaner. She even chastised it for scoffling down a piece of pastry from a pie. This woman was supposedly a worker with street kids? Even they ate bits of dropped burger and pie off the ground when they were hungry enough.
Why do we put up with these wankers and the horrific figures surrounding child abuse? Lets look at some actual data.
1 out of 3 patients in psychiatric care came through the official care system.
2 out of 3 prison inmates in Australia spent their formative years in state care.
4 out of 5 abused children have been in situations where they have suffered systems, emotional and verbal abuse in conjunction with physical and sexual abuse while in the care of the state either in foster care, group homes, disability services or juvenile detention.
Now that is scary stuff. So why do we still have so many children being kidnapped from dysfunctional families and placed into the even more dysfunctional government, religious, non-government and for-profit private care services? I believe strongly that a child, given the right support at home or on the street has a far greater chance of growing up ‘normal’ than in the hands of ‘professional abusers’ in the pay of the government.
People between the ages of 15 and 19 years are more likely to be apprehended by police for a crime than any other population group. The offending rate for 15-19 year olds is four times the offender rate for the remainder of the population. Fortunately for us, the sharp shock of justice coupled with parental support and guidance results in only 1 out of 6 young people offending again, at least in the foreseeable future, or the simple fact that they may not have been caught again.
Why can’t we do something positive about these causes of crime in our community. Family factors such as parental supervision or rejection in the case of step-parents, lack of parental involvement sometimes due to employment and time constraints or just inconsistence in discipline and its application.
Maybe its intelligence and school attendance, performance at school or peer pressure from delinquent friends, poverty and unemployment, or under-employment and substance misuse including legal substances such as caffeine and alcohol.
Is it other social environment risk factors which can be low family socioeconomic factors, its how those around us interact, parental and sibling criminality, it runs in the family (that’s a common one from my experiences) , is it neglect, just letting the child feed, clothe and entertain itself or maybe it’s youth homelessness which needn’t be associated with having a roof over your head.
In Australia and average of 57 males a year between 15 and 19 commit a murder. I’ve had an involvement in this area too, eight times. Along with a similar number of youth suicides. In the juvenile justice system the following horrific figures have been recorded.
Of all inmates:
97% have used alcohol, 94% cannabis, 50% amphetamines and about 30% ecstasy at some time in their life and on a regular basis. In the general population it is Cannabis 63%, alcohol 46% and amphetamines 20% and nearly a third had misused other substances such as paint thinners, travel pills, prescription medication and commercial propellants.
So we can say the use and misuse of drugs regardless of how legal or illegal and whether they should even be used in the human body at all is a major causal factor for unsociable
behaviour. Anyone for injecting Vegemite? (Aged 9)
Stranger danger is the least of our worries? As has been mentioned before various forms of abuse both inside and outside the family has already been scrutinised but it is worth reiterating. From a study of around 400 juveniles in 2012 incarcerated in Australian Detention Centres it was found that 36% reported violent abuse from a parent, 27% from emotional abuse from a family member and 18% total neglect, in other words parents who should be in jail for abuse and not their children. When combined almost half the young people had been abused by parent or sibling. Instances of abuse by extended family and/or strangers were not part of the study. I believe that abuse visited upon these children constitutes about 75% of the reasons why children end up in jail.
Why do we continue to put up with a society or a community that turns a blind eye to neglect and abuse caused by drugs and alcohol, but get very het up about damage to our goods and chattels.
Why do we continue to experience abuse to even younger children than previously. The average age of these kids leaving school is 14 with a quarter departing in year 8 and another third in year 9. Up to 80% of juveniles in detention had not been to school for at least six months and 90% had been suspended, which is a good reason to be pissed off with going to school. I have experienced countless children being suspended from school on the most trivial of offences, and sometimes for being the victim and not the perpetrator. It goes without saying that in all these figures, except for sexual abuse the vast majority of offences are caused by males.
In general of all young people incarcerated in Australia approximately 50% were first locked up between the ages of 10 and 13. We might introduce here that many of the children who go on to become involved in more serious crimes do so because they learnt about, and how to commit, these crimes while locked up with more serious offenders. By the time they were 18 around 40% had been first incarcerated at an average age of 12 while only 10% were locked up after the age of 15. This would go toward suggesting that juvenile detention at younger ages tends to increase the possibility of major offences later in life.
Of the 13,254 children locked up under juvenile justice supervision only 1,989 were aged 18. The majority of these legal adults in juvenile detention was in regard to their mental maturity still being that of a juvenile. In other words they were under-age mentally. There is a lot of good to be said about this when one considers that in the United States children as young as 12 can be locked up in the general prison with adults for the more serious offences regardless of their physical or mental ability to survive in the adult system.
Why do we put up with it? This punish, punish, punish mentality when we know that even in the animal world this direction does not work. I believe in reward, reward and not just in the animal kingdom. I have had more success as a Youth Worker, even with the most difficult of young people, even with young poofter bashers, which ended in several deaths, that reward for good behaviour can be just as effective as punishing bad behaviour. My greatest achievements were often the result of taking a kid to lunch, the movies or even on a group camp for not getting into trouble for even 24 hours. I’ve even rewarded truants going to school for even half a day on the reasoning that you have to attend school but you don’t have to learn anything. It worked for short periods until they ended up in detention again. This revolving door of lock-up and freedom only creates one thing, permanent, and costly prisons.
Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an American of whom I have the greatest admiration, even back in the days of the Civil War wrote about the possibility of swapping the prisoners with the warders and nobody realising it had happened, so corrupt and abusive were they on both sides of the bars.
We have still not realised the positive outcomes of what he suggested and still rely on the ‘corrective’ principal of putting people in boxes and letting them ruminate on their crime. The result of years of contemplation is just more increasingly violent crimes. I may be quoting a little out of context here but what Ingersoll wrote was:-
A man leaves prison and is forced to lie about where he has been in order to get a job. The employer finds out and he is fired. He gets another job and the same thing happens, and then more jobs are lost due to hiss having a criminal record. What the man is foced by society to do is to return to his life of crime in order to ‘survive’. The man ends up in a cycle of crime and punishment from which he has no escape.
What Ingersoll suggested was that while in prison the inmates are given meaningful work and a formal education along with appropriate training for their skill set. In the U.S.A in some states the government has all its furniture, and even military helmets, etc. made within it’s prison system. Whilst on the one hand this is akin to ‘slavery’ it does, on the other, provide the prisoner with some limited skills for the outside world. That’s if he can get a job first.
This was almost suggested back in the days of the Civil War yet nothing meaningful has been done. His idea was to provide apprenticeships in prison whereby after 5, 10 or even 20 years later the prisoner was released with a formally recognised and experienced in a trade. By this means the prisoner could become self-employed rather than depend on an employer for his subsistence. If you could create your own income you could avoid taking the income of others.
I believe we did have ‘industrial prisons’ back in the ‘good old days’ whatever happened to them?
