Killing Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

understand, to live with his aged grandmother.
    Dino’s leave was, believe it or not, into the central business district of the city of Melbourne, where he went to McDonald’s for the first time and then to the pictures. Can anybody explain to me how sitting in a darkened picture theatre for a couple of hours helps you re-integrate into society? This whole exercise backfired as poor Dino, being “out” for the first time in thirteen years, could not cope with the crowds or the pace of the place and freaked out in McDonald’s, dropped his burger and bolted upstairs to a quieter area. How do I know this? The screw who took Dino on the leave told me the same day.
    To say Dino was a mess would be an understatement. As I’ve already said he is a chronic epileptic, and one day they took him off his epilepsy medication. The almost immediate result was that Dino, at the top of the stairs on the first tier of the unit, had a fit and fell down these steel stairs to the bottom. Nobody knew what to do, including the screws. I rolled him onto his side, and we just had to let the fit run its course. He got up and was taken to the doctor – and was placed back on his medication.
    Another one of the Dupas crew was Mark England, known as Biff. Biff was doing twenty-three years for the murder and necrophilia of a grandmother in Geelong. He burgled her house searching for money to buy drugs, murdered the grandmother, then after she was dead had sex with her. He found some money and spent it on drugs, went back and repeated the process again, except on this occasion he tried to burn the house down for good measure. This poor woman had been left dead in her house for a couple of days.
    To show you how smart Biff was, he appealed against his conviction and his sentence and opened his appeal by berating the court, whereupon the judge promptly gave him an extra two years for contempt. If there is ever a move that is not very smart it is to abuse the court when you are seeking that very same court’s leniency.
    Biff too was virtually illiterate, and was only in his early twenties when convicted. He had a very long sentence to go, and on rare occasions would come and work with Dupas and me in the garden. He would swing the mattock for a few minutes, break into a sweat and then head back inside, and continue to do nothing, as was his wont.
    Biff is a classic example of what is wrong with jail. As a young man with a long sentence, rather than give him nothing to do, he should be subject to compulsory education, compulsory life skills and compulsory counselling. In addition he was morbidly obese. There is no compulsory physical fitness regime for such prisoners, and no proper diet, so he was allowed to just blow out. I was with Biff for fifteen months and not once did I see him with an educator or a counsellor. This leaves society in exactly the same position upon his release as it was when he went in. That is, exposed to somebody who is a murderer and a necrophile who is more than likely, due to their inability to cope, to murder again. If he’s educated and properly counselled and effectively re-programmed, it may well be different, but until these things are attended to, these sorts of things will continue to happen and society is the ultimate loser.
    One of the blokes I had real difficulty coming to terms with seeing in jail was Christopher Empey. He had previously been the state manager for Elders in Tasmania. He was married and had a young child who was born while he was in custody. Out of the blue, in a drunken rage while at a conference at Crown Casino, he violently attacked a female colleague, raped her and bashed her to such a degree that she was lucky to survive. Other injuries were inflicted on her which are frankly too terrible to recount here.
    When I met Empey I couldn’t work out why somebody who seemed so normal would behave in such a way. It appears, however, that over the years he had had trouble