Victoria's failure to protect its most disadvantaged citizens is a major vulnerability

In the last three months Victorians have witnessed the release of two major reports that unfortunately did not received the media coverage they deserved. Considered together, they provide an extremely damning assessment of our claim to be ‘the land of the fair go’ and they should make us seriously reconsider the direction of our public policy.

The first one was the Dropping Off the Edge (DOTE2015) report, released in July 2015 by Jesuit Social Services. The report reveals little has been achieved over the past 16 years to alleviate difficulties in the most problem-plagued areas of Australia. According to DOTE2015, those living in the Victorian top 3% of postcodes for disadvantage are three times more likely to be experiencing long-term unemployment or to have been exposed to child maltreatment.

DOTE2015 also confirms the enduring cumulative social disadvantage of a small number of localities across Australia. Year after year Broadmeadows, Corio, Doveton, Frankston North and others continue to feature in the lists of the most vulnerable postcodes, suggesting there is either nothing being done or what is being done is not working.

The second document is the Victorian Ombudsman’s Investigation into the rehabilitation and reintegration of prisoners in Victoria (OBE2015), published in September 2015. According to Ombudsman Deborah Glass, “while the public is understandably horrified by violent crime, we cannot keep pouring funds into a correctional system that is not making us safer”. Why is a senior public servant using such strong language?

According to OBE2015, Victoria’s prison population exploded by 25 per cent between 2011 and 2014. In this period, the budget for correctional services has risen by 31 per cent to $1.04 billion. At a cost to the Victorian taxpayer of around $270 a day per prisoner, prisons are an expensive investment that yields extremely poor results, as nearly one in two prisoners are returning to jail within two years of release.

OBE2015 paints a clear link between disadvantage and imprisonment. For instance, half of Victoria’s prisoners come from six per cent of postcodes. Prisoners are far less likely to have finished school than the average Victorian and have dramatically higher rates of substance abuse, mental illness and acquired brain injury. Even more importantly, prison experience is often multigenerational: the children of prisoners are six times more likely to be imprisoned than their peers.

When the findings of these two reports are put together, the headline is quite clear: we are doing nothing (effective) to improve the conditions of the most vulnerable in our community. This makes our state less safe, and we are responding by building very expensive prisons that not only make disadvantage worse but also act as ‘criminal training’ warehouses.

As a community worker in Broadmeadows, over the last ten years I have witnessed dozens of crisis situations that, with the context provided by these reports, amount to a regional emergency much larger than the sum of its parts.

Based on my experience, it is clear that the allocation of adequate resources to ensure that children and young people growing up in these areas have the necessary support to successfully complete their education and break this vicious cycle is an absolute priority.

Our current drug laws are one of the obvious ways to unlock some of the precious additional resources that would be needed to seriously tackle disadvantage in Victoria. We also need to consider them as they are not serving their intended purpose of protecting our community.

Last week I attended the Broadmeadows Magistrates Court in order to meet with the outgoing Regional Coordinating Magistrate Mr Robert Kumar. Mr Kumar was running late, so I was asked to sit in one of the court rooms. Armed with a good book, I was determined not to pay attention to the proceedings as I felt it was none of my business.

Unfortunately I could not help but recognise the young lady sitting in the dock. She was accused of many crimes, including a serious aggravated burglary charge. I kept looking at her, in vain trying to remember in what circumstances we had met. The young lady was completely disengaged from the court proceedings, clearly much more worried about the fact that she was likely not to see her toddler for quite a long time. The prosecutor listed a long litany of offences, and proceeded to interview a member of the police who provided more details about the case. Apparently fuelled by an ice addiction, she and her co-accused had gone into a crime spree, breaking into a house and several cars, and it was clearly not the first time. Interestingly, despite a long history of drug-fuelled crime, the accused had never been offered drug and alcohol counselling.

Mr Kumar went on to ask who the co-accused was, and as soon as his name was uttered by the prosecutor everything clicked. The name triggered a series of flashbacks: the “co-accused” attending our community centre for the first time, permanently hungry, clearly left to his own devices too often and from a very early age, barely able to read and write, often misbehaving, with something extremely endearing about him nonetheless.

More flashbacks: calls to Child Protection, interviews with Youth Corrections Officers, attempts to enrol him in school, almost daily visits and chats at the community centre, positive engagement but clearly not enough. 

“My brother has been locked up again”. This sentence, uttered the following day, put it all in place. All this time I have been thinking about the issues brought up by both reports, without actively linking them to our drug policy!

For a decade I have worked with many individuals who have struggled with drug abuse. In this time I have never witnessed a situation in which our current drug laws have restricted access for anyone. The morality of the prohibition of drugs would be an interesting and relevant topic if this prohibition could be enforced.

In this inability to enforce drug laws, we are faced with the following problems:

• drugs are readily available for people who want them, but their trade is completely unregulated, putting users, and people living in communities where drug trafficking is prevalent, at physical risk in a number of ways:
  • there is no way for users to know the composition of the drugs they purchase;
  • drug traffickers are not obliged, and do not have an incentive to deny access to drugs to young people under 18, or to people who are severely intoxicated[
  • sitting outside the law, drug traffickers often carry and use weapons; and
  • users often consume drugs in parks or public places and needles are not safely disposed of.
• the secrecy involved in drug use makes it difficult for consumers to access proper information about drugs, their effects and support services available. 
• there are thousands of people making millions of dollars by selling drugs who not only get to take home 100% of their profits, but they also get to claim Centrelink payments on top of that.
• more millions of dollars are spent on resources aimed at fuelling this war on drugs in the form of police, courts and prisons.   

In my view, the issues outlined in this article point to the need to decriminalise and regulate drug use in Victoria, using the resources that would be unlocked to break the cycle of disadvantage by improving opportunities for children and young people growing up in disadvantaged areas and by changing the focus of our prison system to prioritise rehabilitation and reintegration.