Booze Territory: The Crisis of Alcoholism

 Anna Krien | The Monthly | September 2011 

On a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 am. I’m told this is one of Alice Springs’ three notorious ‘animal bars’ but, when I get there, the hotel is all shut up. The car park is empty except for a car with an Aboriginal couple sitting inside. I tap on their window and wave my hand at the closed pub. “Not open?”

“2 pm,” comes the answer.

“Oh,” I nod. I’m about to get back into my car when I realise the woman is talking about the bottle shop.

“You mean the bottle shop isn’t open till two?” I ask. She nods. “You waiting around for that?” She nods again. “Isn’t there a bar here?” That’s when I discover a section of the pub is open. The woman directs me out of the car park, back along the main road and down the side of the hotel. A small concrete corridor with no roof doglegs until it is hidden from street view, where a toothless security guard greets me. He raises an eyebrow, then runs a metal detector across my clothes and confiscates my pens.

“Someone’s been stabbed with a pen before,” he says. “You can grab ’em when you leave, luv.”

Behind me an Aboriginal boy, just turned 18, offers a scrap of paper to prove he’s of age. Kindly, the security guard explains how to get a proper ID and turns him away. I walk up a cement ramp to a bar, billiard tables and pokies. There are lots of people milling around but the guy at the entrance tells me it doesn’t “get pumping till 11.30 am”, when the bar “switches to full-strength beer”. Techno music blares out of speakers. As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. “Am I lost?” he wants to know.

In a way, I am. I don’t want a beer. It’s 10 am, for Chrissake.

*

At the Todd Tavern down the road it’s just after midday and the place is jumping. Billy Joel is on the jukebox and women jiggle in time, waiting to be served. On one side of the tavern is the Riverside Bar, the original ‘animal bar’, complete with blackened windows creating a kind of false night for its drinkers, who chuck their empties into wheelie bins dotted around the room. A lone white man runs the bar.

“They’re comfortable in there,” numerous people say to me when I ask about the low-slung ceiling that makes you hunch and the permanent night. “No oneforces them to drink there.”

In 2009 CCTV footage revealed 236 people inside the small bar at 11.48 am when it is licensed for 100 – the Todd was suspended from trading for 5 days. Today, around the other side of the tavern, the cleaner and more sophisticated bar with clear windows is also full of Indigenous people. What used to be a voluntarily segregated pub – blacks in the animal bar, whites in the classier section – is now black and black.

Outside, Indigenous people are hanging around the closed roller doors of the Thirsty Camel drive-through bottle shop attached to the Todd Tavern. Some form small groups, others wait in banged-up cars across the road, and a lone man, his purple shirt tucked into black pants, his belt buckle and boots shining, with a cowboy hat tilted over his eyes, leans against the brick wall, waiting.

At 2 pm the shutters will open, the tavern will close and the drinking will shift to the dry riverbed of the Todd River.

The change in the hour brings about a different kind of busyness as pubs are cleaned for the late afternoon trade. It is rush hour for Alice Springs taxi drivers. “No car, no drive-through” is the new rule for these bottlos (unless you’re white, in which case you can walk up and buy whatever you want), and taxis are hailed for the 10 metre trip and paid much, much more than the distance demands.

‘Bush’ minibuses that drive back and forth from remote Indigenous communities are cheered and hailed into the Gap View Hotel car park, the accordion doors opening for six or so blackfellas, some so zonked they can barely muster any sign of life. And then off they go! Through the drive-through!

I watch as the guy in the purple shirt and cowboy hat approaches the bottle shop and is shooed away like a feral dog. “No car, no drive-through,” an attendant yells at the man’s back as he slinks away.

Kids in limbo: Australia's growing reliance on juvenile remand

Daniel Feher | The Drum | 17 August 2011

Limbo:

1. An uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution;

2. A state of oblivion;

3. The feeling experienced when held on remand.

Throughout Australian jurisdictions detention is considered an option of last resort in combating juvenile offending, with custodial sentences imposed only when other diversionary measures have failed.

Despite this principle, the number of youths remanded in detention has nearly tripled since 1981, with 60 per cent of young people in Australian detention centres held without sentencing. This figure points to a need for better youth justice programs to keep kids out of lockup, and underlines the greater problem of how to combat chronic juvenile offending by at-risk youths.

According to the recently released Doing Time – Time For Doing report, there are currently over 1,300 minors in detention around Australia, with over half identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. For many it is not their first time "in" and sadly, it may not be their last either. In 90 per cent of juvenile offence cases, the kids learn from their mistakes and exit the system, however it is the remaining 10 per cent who continue as chronic reoffenders that are the main cause for concern. These youths return to custody because of gaps and inconsistencies in post-release service provision that see them released back into the community without the adequate support they need to take control of their lives.

The media frequently leads us to believe that these so-called "hardened" youths are pathological criminals - villainous, defiant and perpetually "up to no good". However research spurred by these reports shows that the reality of these children's situations is far more complex, sad and unfortunate. Most have experienced some form of poverty, abuse or neglect, and many have been exposed to criminal behaviour and drug use from an early age, frequently through immediate family or close relatives. Suffering from a lack of care and positive role models, juvenile detainees often describe being forced to grow up quickly from an unreasonably early age and in some cases take care of younger siblings. In many cases this leads to a prematurely heightened sense of independence that causes a disconnect with the child's social and behavioural development and schooling. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander detainees in particular describe a loss of culture and identity, and subsequently a feeling of not belonging and alienation.

Over half of the young people in custody have mental health issues and more than two-thirds have a substance abuse problem that, in many cases, began before they were teenagers. Comorbidity in mental health and substance abuse problems is particularly prevalent, and the majority of detainees with a mental health problem will also have a history of drug use and self-medication. This is just a brief snapshot of the challenges this cohort of kids face in turning their lives around. It also highlights the appallingly negative progress that has been made in combating Aboriginal overrepresentation in the justice system since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 20 years ago.

Compounding these challenges is the strain of incarceration. Results from a recent study by the Australian Institute of Criminology mirrored overseas findings that juvenile detention has no specific deterrent effect, and also pointed to other findings indicating a negative long-term impact on employment prospects. Led by veteran director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don Weatherburn, the study cited a considerable body of research indicating that custodial environments are in themselves criminogenic, serving to harden young detainees and make them increasingly difficult to rehabilitate.

The financial costs of juvenile detention are also substantial, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year for very little gain. Tasmania allocates the most on its juvenile inmates at $800 per child, per day, while Victoria is the thriftiest, at $408, with the other states and territories falling in between. Whichever figure you back, it remains a considerable sum to keep a youth in limbo for just one day.

Low IQ and in jail

ABC Radio 576, Background Briefing | Cathy Van Extel | 17 April 2010

Many intellectually disabled people end up in jail. They plead guilty to minor crimes not understanding either social rules or the consequences. Hear the story of Melisa who has an IQ of 57, which is in the lowest l%, and who still faces jail.