Hi PAUL1405...

You've touched on several very salient issues in your latest thread.

The facts are; While it's true, there are far more blacks in gaol than there should be, for several reasons;

(a) they 'DO' tend to commit more misdemeanours (streets offences) than they should (and the reasons for this are both complex and varied, as we've already touched upon) ?

(b) the more serious (indictable) offences usually arise out of some booze or drugs fuelled activity, and the poor buggers cannot avail themselves of a competent barrister, thus they have to rely upon legal aid.

(c) In the bush the visiting Magistrate will often sentence a black fella to a short term in gaol, in order they may have proper access to a necessary regimen of medical/dental/alcoholic/drugs and more importantly a better diet to give them a chance to fix themselves up while inside. Furthermore, if domestic violence is an issue, it gives the antagonists spouse and kids some breathing space, or time to leave if she wishes ? - Paul, it's really an act of kindness all round, I kid you not !

Any incarceration, indigenous or not, adds to the imprisonment stats. Thus it does have the 'far left' jumping up and down bleating racism !

Paul, I'm retired now. However, it's a real pity when I was a relieving sergeant in the bush ? I couldn't have taken you around and shown you exactly, the real problems confronting our indigenous people. Specifically the terrible effects of booze and drugs, their almost primitive and unhygienic living conditions, and the terrible consequences these peddlers of booze and drugs, have had on this ancient race of people.

As I said in an earlier post, I was less then sympathetic for the black man, 'til I was sent bush ? Now, it's not a case of not enough money, it's really doing what needs to be done. Engendering (or restoring) self-respect, appropriate (initial) education, vocational (trades) training, catching these bastard peddlers of booze and drugs - this would be a positive start !

Hi Paul,

Spot on: ".... society would be better served trying to keep people from offending in the first place, and therefore out of jail, much more productive."

Yes, indeed. This is the point about funding programs which actually work, especially re-engagement, re-integration, anti-alienation programs, whatever you call them - programs that encourage/require [i.e. carrot and stick] young people to seize the multitude of opportunities available and make something of their lives. This might involve orienting those young people towards making use of the magic ingredient: effort.

Sociologically rather than anthropologically speaking, 'culture' is the lived experiences of people, and how and what they pass down to their children. One unfortunate problem with drop-kick parents, Black and white, is that they exert enormous influence on their children.

There is more than a grain of truth in the Marxist anthropologist Oscar Lewis' notion of a "culture of poverty", passed from parents to children, generation after generation - not necessarily a poverty of cash, but a poverty of ideas, horizons and effort.

Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of records, one can trace the sorry passage of cultural messages from drop-kicks from the 1860s, through to their children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren.

Vice versa: thank goodness, one can trace the striving of other ancestors, through to their multitude of graduate descendants today. My wife's great-grandfather John Sumner (1848?-1905, the first Ngarrindjeri to take out a lease of land, in the 1870s), for example, would, if he were alive today, count perhaps a hundred descendants who are graduates, perhaps dozens with Masters' degrees, while other families are yet to get one kid through Year 12.

Sociologically, culture is passed down through the family, close relatives, who 'guide' how to live and prevail, either by skiving or striving: so some people have intimate knowledge of education and work opportunities while others have intimate knowledge of all manner of welfare programs - and, it seems, never the twain shall meet, unless there are specific, workable programs to make the difference. Lives depend on making that difference.

Joe

o sung wu,

I daresay that when you were in the force you could reel off the relatively few but always reliable residential addresses and places the police patrols would be visiting in the shift.

You could go one further to point at small communities and postcodes where crime was always endemic.

Maybe you sometimes paused to reflect that the residential addresses where drugs, drunkenness, violence and other nastiness occurred changed as the ferals finally moved when police presence became too hot.

At the same time it would have been apparent that only some low income earners lead problematical lives and that applies to indigenous people too.

It isn't being poor or having a bad start (unless mum had the babe addicted to drugs in the womb) that decides one's future. That is made starkly obvious by the larger rump of the population who had to make their own way and did.

The biggest problem we face is how to provide some separation and sanctuary to everyone else FROM the marauding, preying ferals who have no pride in themselves, have decided on a career as a dependent, taker and criminal and are trying to drag everyone else down.

When police take away the drunken/drugged brute there will always be those scrubbers and apologists who see the offender as the victim and try to excuse him. Please remember though that we the public know that the real victims now have some relief while the cowardly offender is being dealt with by the only people he fears, the police.

What is obvious is that it cannot be bad luck, a bad start, discrimination and whatever that 'makes' the man offend, nor does it 'turn' him or seal his future. He does all of that himself by continuing to make poor decisions, quite deliberately, and by never taking responsibility. He chooses to be lazy, to flea off others and society and wouldn't work for a quid in an iron lung.

Dear O Sung Wu,

We're told that "You can put an individual
offender through the best-resourced and most effective rehab
program, but if they're returning to a community with few
opportunities their chances of staying out of prison are
limited."

I'm sure that as a former police officer with Aboriginal
experience - you'll agree.

Dearest Foxy,

What does it mean, " .... a community with few opportunities" ? Individuals have plenty of opportunities, and communities are more or less made up of those individuals.

Or do you mean that communities, per se, can implicitly or tacitly cripple individuals' access to opportunities ? Yes, I'll agree that communities can often be negative, ghastly, deadly places, whose degraded 'members' do nothing about the worst excesses of human behaviour.

Obviously, since human beings are not tied or chained or rooted to the spot in communities, they can pick themselves up and move. It may not have to be forever, or even for all that long, people can always come back to their birth communities for visits, and then get the hell back out again.

But all Indigenous people have as much right to the full spectra of opportunities as any other Australians, no matter where they may be. And, as it happens, there are probably far more programs being funded to do exactly that, for Indigenous youth.

Given the outcomes of those programs, and the high offence-incarceration rates, we're back where we started :)

Love,

Joe

Hi o sung wu,

it is a sad indictment when you honestly and truly can say;
"a short term in gaol, in order they may have proper access to a necessary regimen of medical/dental/alcoholic/drugs and more importantly a better diet to give them a chance to fix themselves up while inside. Furthermore, if domestic violence is an issue, it gives the antagonists spouse and kids some breathing space, or time to leave if she wishes ? - Paul, it's really an act of kindness all round, I kid you not!"
o sung wu, the worse thing about that statement is its true, and that is sad indeed.

"funding programs which actually work, especially re-engagement, re-integration, anti-alienation programs, whatever you call them - programs that encourage/require [i.e. carrot and stick] young people to seize the multitude of opportunities available and make something of their lives. This might involve orienting those young people towards making use of the magic ingredient: effort." Absolutely Joe who could disagree with that, the key is to ensure, with the best of intention there is a final positive outcome for people. Many programs begin with the best of intentions, but for one reason or another fall by the wayside, and all is lost.

cont