I drove for the best part of 11 hours over the last few days giving a Do Lecture (would you believe?) which was fun. In any event I listened to some seriously great radio.
Inside the drug court I was riveted by three 50 minute docos on the NSW Drug Court. It really is a tragedy that our media overlords have decided that this innovation is ‘soft’ on crime compared with the traditional system. I think it’s much better understood as simply breaking down the interface between prison and out of prison in a more thoughtful way than the traditional system does.
The traditional system exercises various sentencing and post-sentencing discretions. All the NSW Drug Court does is design a system of discretion and resources so that the incentives in the prison system actually work in the short term – where we know from research (and commonsense) that stimulus-response mechanisms work much more effectively.
The NSW Drug Court operates by suspending the sentences of prisoners and bringing them into a regime where their progress and their liberty is reassessed every week in a court hearing before a judge. This is combined with some counselling resources and drug tests three times weekly. They must attend all appointments on time, and they must self-declare all breaches of their conditions in their weekly court hearing. When they acquire 14 ‘sanctions’ or recorded failures to meet these conditions (and with their chaotic lives they often they acquire several in a single week) they are sent back to prison detox unit for 14 days and so the process goes on until they either graduate to stages two and three which involve progressively less intense supervision after which they graduate altogether. The alternative throughout is that they simply lose their place in the program and complete their prison sentence.
As you can see, it’s hardly ‘soft’. Just a sensible adaptation of the prison system and its resources to the challenge which the radio programs show you is an immense one, of rebuilding the life of a person who’s leant on drugs to get them through their life for often at least one, and frequently two or more decades, while their life has fallen further and further apart, while what semblance there was of order in their lives has been thoroughly white-anted, whose whole identity and social network is built on their life on drugs and outside the law. So it’s pretty much out of the fire of prison and into the frying pan of a Skinner box of active operant conditioning.
It still struck me how legally based the program still was. I have no problem with the legal architecture. A court hearing once a week might make a lot of sense, but it seemed to me the program, as good as it seemed to be was still crying out for more peer support mechanisms such as those we build in TACSI, in addition to – and probably in replacement of some of – the professional support. The three programs were made over 14 months and take you inside the process and into the lives of four or five people who go through the process. If you don’t have three hours, take just one and listen to one of the programs. (This is an order from Troppo Headquarters – your internet address has been logged). I found them gripping. You’ll love and despair at some of the characters. The programs, in order are here, here and here.
The vagabond Fascinating story of an eccentric Melbourne man who set himself up as The Vagabond, (presumably) Australia’s first ’embedded’ journalist reporting from the front-line of various institutions of Melbourne that would have been, without him, out of sight out of mind. Here’s the link.
Peter Sculthorpe I’m not much of a fan of modern ‘serious’ music and so have not listened to Peter Sculthorpe. Indeed, after listening to him being interviewed and loving doing so, I’m curious to listen to some of his music which I will, though I don’t have any strong expectation that I’ll even like it. But the moment you hear his voice you can hear that he’s a certain kind of older person. Centred, thoughtful, humble, insightful about his life and the world around him. I love listening to such people. His music wafts beautifully mostly in the background. Here’s the link.
Note: All these programs other than the last are on a new program called Earshot which seems to simply scoop up all sorts of docos on just the kinds of subjects that interest me. It also seems to have absorbed the ABC’s religious program Encounter, which I’ve always liked, though some of the programs I listened to on my drive were pretty disappointing. One on Volunteer Tourism took an awfully long time to get to the point of what was wrong with it beyond vague generalities and the second program in three on Faith, reason and the three Abrahamic religions – on Islam which let radical Islamic spokespeople off way too lightly IMO. They all claimed to be non-violent and I presume they were, but the scene was set with references to Australian Muslims demonstrating with signs calling for the death of those who ridicule the prophet. The Muslims in the program were not even asked to say what our attitude or policy should be to such conduct or required to confront it as a problem.
The episode on Christianity interviewed some very interesting people – like poet Christian Wyman. It offered a reasonable alternative view to schoolboy atheism, but having set up the dichotomy between atheism and belief drifted into a comfortable “we’re among Christians here” mood offering the alternative view without going to the trouble of offering anything that would have any chance of at least slightly unsettling the schoolboy atheists they’d framed the program around (many of whom are readers of this site).
Postscript: the audio of the audio.
The three drug court mp3s (I’ve taken to backing them up here as the ABC has a nasty habit of taking them down).