TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
As a bit of a postscript follow up to what Jim just said. As a person who's entering the legal profession in Victoria, there's been a very interesting case called Uran and Bald Hills in Victoria that was decided about a year ago where two men were able to successfully sue a wind farm, they adjoined in their property for the tort of nuisance, and they were able to actually get very significant damages for that. So there is hope for property rights yet in the common law. I'm sure that's something that the renewables industry and their lobbyist mates are looking to change. But yeah, that's just an interesting aside that I thought I'd add following on from Jim.
So if you heard my chat with Steve Austin on Friday morning on ABC Radio, terrific. I know some people might not have. If you'd like to and hear it at more length and more time than what I have today, you can go onto the ABC website and we'll soon be putting that up on our party socials as well. What I wanted to do today is split my talk into three parts. The first I'm going to talk for a brief moment about my story and what my journey has been. Then I'm going to look a little bit at where Queensland is at today with respect to law and order and youth justice in particular. And then I'm going to finish with where a third way, a different way might lie between what the options we're currently being faced with are. So I hope that's going to be of use and interest.
So in my twenties, I struggled with really severe drug and alcohol addiction. I had always had a problem with alcohol. As a young man, I came late to harder drugs and substances like ecstasy and eventually speed cocaine and methamphetamine and other things. But ultimately these things took a really significant toll in my life. And at the same time as I was being crushed by the weight of these addictions, my small business that I'd started during a period of relative stability and sobriety also collapsed under both the weight of my addictions and under the strain of my inexperience and debt that I'd taken on to start that business.
So ultimately my life unravelled at a rate of knots in a very public way. I was somebody who, as I do now, was very involved in my local community and young liberal politics at the time. And so I'd sort of put myself out there and really was living in a way that was totally opposite to the values I was espousing.
So unfortunately, it was a very interesting story for the media and what might've been unremarkable in other circumstances turned into page one to three news. For a couple of weeks, my life had become so unmanageable that my first feeling when I was tapped on the shoulder and asked, are you Jordan Dittloff as a precursor to my arrest, was relief that that was the feeling I had, relief that I could rest, that things had now been taken out of my hands. That's how bad my life was. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that if I hadn't been arrested when I was then I would almost certainly be dead one way or another. So that's how close I was to the edge to disaster. The first, I think five to six weeks I was in prison, I really felt as though my life had ended.
In a sense, I felt as though life as I knew it was over and that my future held only more drug and alcohol abuse and future offending. Somehow I managed to, I think partly out of stubbornness. It certainly wasn't out of really any hope or kind of optimism for the future, but somehow I sort of clung to this sense of myself through that time. And slowly but surely I began to be able to put one foot in front of the other start to think about what the future might hold because as it turned out, the sky hadn't fallen in. I was still waking up every morning and drawing breath, and I started to think about what my future might look like. And for the next 27 months, which was the sentence I received for my white collar and drug related offending, I thought every day, what can I take from the situation and the experiences I've had and the environment I'm in and what can I take with me?
What can I make the most of and do to try to turn things around? So I got into the gym, started getting physically fit and physically better. I started studying an undergraduate business degree and I completed half of that while I was in prison. And perhaps most importantly, and I'll come back to this in the second part of my talk, I started to understand the value of helping others and really serving the community. The prison experience I had for 18 months of my sentence for the larger part was in an open camp working farm. And as a result, I was able to spend three or four days a week with a team of other inmates working in the community, in the local Beachworth area where I was incarcerated. And that experience of seeing how many things there are in the community that people can make a huge difference with feeling the gratitude and welcome and acceptance of the local community in response for what we were doing was an experience that I think really was extremely formative for who I decided I wanted to be in the future.
When I finished my prison term, I had 16 months of parole and I finished my business degree, but most importantly, I got a job and I got a job with full disclosure of my past. And to me, I think that was probably one of the key pillars of my rehabilitation, and it has remained so since. And I think in a lot of ways we are not setting young people who interact with the justice system up to succeed and to genuinely rehabilitate. I'm not sure what the Brisbane equivalent of the Herald Sun is here, what the Murdoch sort of press that Brisbane has is. But in Melbourne, the Herald Sun is the sort of main Murdoch press. And if you read that paper every day and formed your view of what the average Australian is like and what their attitude is, you would have a view of Australians that would be very mean-spirited, very harsh, very unforgiving, cancel culture, all that kind of thing that people don't want others to succeed or would be extremely judgmental of people who have made mistakes.
But I can tell you, and this fills me with a great degree of pride and optimism that that has not been my experience. To the contrary, when you are upfront, when you disclose what happened and why and most importantly what you've learned from it and what you have done since. My experience has been that Australians everywhere are incredibly forgiving, are incredibly willing to give people in my situation and other young people who have experienced criminal justice and offending an opportunity and a chance, it's deeply ingrained in the Australian psyche to want to help someone who's having a go and to want somebody who's an underdog and who's really trying to turn things around to succeed. So that's a good thing and that's an amazing part of our community that I don't think the government or the powers that be the mainstream media really know a lot about.
So ultimately my journey saw me completing my business degree, and then at the outset of Covid, I took things one step further and I returned to my legal studies. I've done a very short stint, unfortunately cut short by going on the off ramp of drugs and alcohol. Not coincidentally, I did six months of an undergrad law degree and found I enjoyed law society parties and recreational drugs more than studying law, unfortunately at the time. But at the beginning of Covid, I returned to study and in recent months, so in November of last year, I completed my juris doctor postgraduate law degree and I now work as a law graduate completing my articles at a civil litigation firm. So reflecting on my own experiences, I'd like to touch a little bit on what's happening in Queensland now. So there are some aspects of my story
Jewel Burbidge:
We need to hear what you have decided to do.
Jordan Dittloff:
Yes, so sorry, Jules. Very correct. There's another important element of my story that is of note that I think also has a big part to play when we're considering what needs to happen for young people here in Queensland. Yeah, of course, being too quiet is not something I'm often accused of. So one of the key pillars of my rehabilitation, so finding gainful employment, disclosing my past, and also making repayments to my victims. So while I was in prison earning a wage of probably under $50 a month, I think it was like $47 or something like that, I began the slow but steady process of sending money out to the Geelong County Court and beginning to make repayments to my victims. So there's no automatic process by which that happens. There's no garnishing or docking of wages or anything like that. But that process for me morally and psychologically I think has just enabled me to walk down the street with my head up to stand in front of a group like this and to go on radio like I did on Friday and to speak about my experiences because I know that as my life improves and as I'm able to give more, I'm able to continue the process of repaying and setting right the harm I did to others.
And so I think if we think about what's happening in Queensland today, we have youth justice and we have a youth cohort, many of whom are from ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds that are new to our country that have come here as migrants or as refugees. Often though there are many local young people who are also falling into these traps and patterns and they are lost. They've been comprehensively failed by a society that increasingly has a vacuum where once there was a nuclear family, extended family for many people, faith or church, community groups, sporting clubs, all of these things that once would have been that third thing between school or home that would've helped catch kids that are going to slip through these cracks where those things were. There's now a vacuum where relying on the government and the state we're relying on the police, on teachers to raise children.
And I think that you cannot ignore the source of many of these problems that there is this vacuum or this societal decay that has caused these issues. So when we have young people engaging in these kind of antisocial behaviours and stealing cars, assaulting people, robbing, murdering even in some cases, what do we as a society do? How do we respond? And at the moment, the mainstream parties are offering two approaches, both of which I believe are wrong and miss the point. On the one hand, we've got the law and order toughen, crime warehouse and then smash into the ground approach. And that unmitigated and unbalanced leads to people getting out of prison and feeling as though there is nothing for them, that they have no forgiveness, that all they can do is revert to what they know and that there's no opportunity for them to be given a chance and to reintegrate into society.
On the other hand, we have the woke Iist ideology of the left, which says that these young people themselves are victims. That someone who steals a car or assaults or kills a grandmother in their home is somehow a victim of their circumstances and of a system that has failed them. And the problem with that ideology, other than being manifestly wrong, as all of you, I can see from your faces would agree, is that it robs young people who are in this situation of any opportunity to take agency, to take ownership of their experiences as I was able to. It's denying them the ability to learn and to grow because they're being told that why what has happened has happened is nothing to do with them. That they are simply victims and part of a system that is flawed and who benefits from a systemic failure.
The mainstream parties who are arguing for this, and it robs the individual, it robs communities of the ability to find redemption, to find rehabilitation. So if not these options, if not these two extremes that I believe both fall outside the goalposts or the swimming flags, then what can we do? What should we do as a society? While I would be reluctant to come from Victoria and come to Queensland and try to sort of proselytise or say what should happen in your state, I believe that first must come consequences. There is no model or no solution under which there is not a repercussion or a consequence for the harm. The difference that libertarians believe is that the harm should be as closely matched to the harm caused as possible. We're not talking an eye for an eye that a death matches a death. But if you steal a car or if you rob or if you assault, there needs to be a reparation made to the actual victims of your offending.
The state, the government, the police, they stand in the way of the victims. They put themselves in the victim's chair and then they say, oh, it's fine, we forgive you. But that's not how society works. That's not how in our hearts and in our emotions, society works. And so these young people often get out of prison being told your site's clean and they enter the community and expect that that's the case, that they've been forgiven. But that's just misses the whole picture. So I believe that first must come consequence and consequence as swift as possible and as matching to what has taken place as possible. If I had not received a 27 month prison sentence, that would not have allowed me to achieve the change I've achieved. I saw some people in my prison term come back three times. I saw three different people come back three times in my 27 months and get short sentences four to five months.
And it's just not enough of a consequence and a punishment to be that circuit breaker that people need. Once there has been an appropriate consequence, then we need to look at what we know works, what we know will allow people to desist from offending and turn their life around. And in a lot of areas of policy, it's very unclear. We don't know exactly what works. I'm coming, coming to an end in criminal justice and in recidivism that is not the case. There is a huge body of evidence. We know what works, it's just not politically popular. Education and employment are the two critical critical features. People who re-offend. Well, people who offend once are 66% likely to re-offend within the next 10 years. That's the normal statistic where those people have received education and employment. That statistic reverses 66% of people who have those protective factors turn their life around and do not go back to prison. So we know what works. We have an opportunity if we give people an appropriate sanction to help them achieve these things on their release from prison. And if we can do that and if we can allow people to take ownership of their mistakes, then I believe that is the true solution to this area of policy.
So thank you very much.
Bonus: Interview with Steve Austen ABC Radio Brisbane
Steve Austin:
I often bring you stories and interviews about crime and it's very frustrating. The recidivism rate, the repeat offence rate is around what, 60 to 65% depending on who you speak with. Today, my guest is someone who's a story that's somewhat different, but he also has some personal observations to make about how we treat offenders and how to get people to change their behaviour. So I hope you'll keep listening. Also, later on this hour, you'll have a chance to ask a question of another Lord Mayoral candidate, Brisbane City Council Lord Mayoral candidate from the Greens this time Jonathan Sriranganathan. If you have a question for Jonathan Rena, you can give us a call. Usual number applies 1300 triple two six twelve is the phone number, or send me a text, 0467 922 612, 922 612.
Promo VO:
You are with Steve Austin streaming live on the ABC. Listen now on 612 AM and on your smart speaker. This is ABC Radio Brisbane.
Steve Austin:
My next guest spent two years in prison. The reason was he stole, he lied, he defrauded yet his story is different from most, he's working to pay back monies he stole due to his drug and alcohol addiction, which led to crime and then to prison. And he had some different observations around the justice system and around dealing with young offenders. He said, and I quote, I chose to take ownership of my mistakes. His name is Jordan Dilo. He's actually in Queensland for the weekend. And I know you hopped on a train from the Gold Coast this morning to make it to Brisbane. So thanks for coming in, Steve Jordan,
Jordan Dittloff:
Thanks for having me,
Steve Austin:
Steve, and sorry to keep you waiting, but crime's been a bit of an issue this morning. What did you do?
Jordan Dittloff:
So I struggled with drug and alcohol addiction all throughout my young adulthood up until age 27 when things ultimately culminated in a prison sentence. As you noted. And alongside that drug and alcohol addiction, I started a small business borrowed heavily to start it. And my unaddressed issues with drugs, alcohol, and my business and experience and lack of business skills culminated all together at the same time with a pretty public unravelling of my life that caused a lot of harm to my victims, of my offending the clients of my travel agency, but also to people in the community, my family and others around me. So that all blew up and sort of unravelled at a fairly rapid pace on the public stage back in 2015,
Steve Austin:
Became quite a media story I think at the time.
Jordan Dittloff:
Yeah, it did. It did. And those things caused a consequence. And one of the things that I think I realised very early on in my prison sentence was it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Not because prison's a great place to be or somewhere that is inherently good or healing, but because for me it was that circuit breaker where I could really reflect and change some of my behaviours.
Steve Austin:
Did you meet many other people in prison who had a drug and alcohol addiction?
Jordan Dittloff:
Absolutely. Overwhelmingly, and interestingly, the other main reason or the other main cause that brought people to prison who I met was domestic violence and family violence issues. So those two things together and often at the same time I think contributes to probably 70 or 80% of the adult mainstream prison population anywhere.
Steve Austin:
So in prison you met people who had a drug and alcohol conviction and were perpetrators of domestic or family violence.
Jordan Dittloff:
The two quite often went hand in hand. Yes.
Steve Austin:
Do you have any observations to draw about that that you think are useful or pertinent at the moment?
Jordan Dittloff:
I think reflecting on the caller feedback you just had before we started, I think that with so many things, whether it be family violence or youth justice, all of these issues began at the community level. And what we've got today is a vacuum that used to be filled by families and that's like family and extended family by sometimes church groups or faith groups, community groups and volunteer organisations, sporting clubs, these things that sort of filled the void between work and home. And I think what we're seeing in many areas of modern life is this fraying or disintegration of the social fabric because those things have wined away. And what that vacuum's being replaced with for many people, whether it be in the home environment or whether it be in youth justice and the experience of young people growing up, it's being replaced by pretty destructive antisocial behaviours,
Steve Austin:
Crystal meth addiction in particular, but alcohol addiction as well is running rampant through this city. It's also a big deal in regional cities. Crystal meth is tragically rampant in regional towns here in Queensland. You were in a regional town. Can you recall why you were attracted to drug or alcohol use? Was it just circumstance peer group, often it's a life trauma. What was it for you?
Jordan Dittloff:
I think that some people have a predisposition towards addiction. I've always been and remain someone with a very intense addictive personality. I've just learned over time to channel that into more productive endeavours. I've been totally abstinent from drugs and alcohol for over eight and a half years now.
Steve Austin:
And you made the worst decision ever and became a lawyer now.
Jordan Dittloff:
Well, whether that's a move up in the world because jail is something I'm going to leave open to your viewers.
Steve Austin:
Sorry, I didn't mean to put you off, so
Jordan Dittloff:
No, no. And I mean the greatest respect. Yeah,
Steve Austin:
Sorry, that was my bad. So you spent time in prison, what did you learn about prison? I think first of all, you have an experience of both remand and prison education systems and your view of the benefit or otherwise of those is somewhat different.
Jordan Dittloff:
Yeah, it is. And I think when we're talking about youth justice and when we're talking about corrections in Brisbane today, we have to start with the acknowledgement that the community has a right to feel safe. There are people who are genuinely and legitimately and rightly concerned that they can't go about their life, sleep in their beds and walk down the street and be safe. And that is something that as a baseline you have to acknowledge. But what often gets missed I think, is that there's this idea that you either have to be tough on crime and smash people into the ground and impose really draconian punishments or you have to treat people who commit criminal offences as victims and give them a slap on the wrist and there are no consequences. And it seems as though our public discourse is just one of those two extremes. When the truth is somewhere in the middle lies this balance where the best form of protection for the community is rehabilitation. And those two goals are synergistic. The most sustainable cost-effective and lasting community safety you can get is when people cease to re-offend and actually achieve rehabilitation.
Steve Austin:
We have watch houses here which are full, and I mean physically full. The police are very frustrated because they can arrest someone. They go to court, they're in a watch house and they're actually squeezing them in certain places. There's detention centres which are full, so full we're building more. And your description of our debate at the moment is exactly that. It's either one extreme or the other extreme, and neither of them really seem to be a genuine answer to the problem. Your story is one I understand of restorative justice. So you think, let me go through some things. First of all, you think an offender before we have sympathy, or correct me if I'm wrong here before we have sympathy or compassion for them, say they're there, your poor guy, you had a tough family upbringing and your father didn't love you and your mother didn't hug you, and this is why you're committing these offences. You think before we get to that point, they have to take ownership of their situation and their mistakes. In other words, admit guilt almost. Am I framing you correctly, but clarify for me?
Jordan Dittloff:
I think that the first thing that has to happen is consequences. Personally, my views are very libertarian. I believe that when people commit harm or harm others, there should be a consequence that as much as possible matches the harm that's been done and ideally tries to restore what's been harmed to the person involved or at least to the community that's
Steve Austin:
Involved. So a young person who commits an offence must feel a consequence for their actions.
Jordan Dittloff:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you don't start with that, then you are robbing young people of the ability to take agency and to actually learn and grow and take ownership of what happens.
Steve Austin:
Explain that for me because the argument here is we have to sort of divert them, the community defence that we divert them, we say it's their environment, their upbringing. They might've grown up in a household where drug and alcohol abuse was rampant. A father was violent, a mother was abusive. You are telling me that we need to somehow turn that slightly.
Jordan Dittloff:
I think that the idea that diversion and consequence have to be different things is not necessarily right. When I say consequence, I don't mean prison. And I think that the more we can think creatively and try to find solutions that, like you said at the very beginning, start with the community, that is the most powerful thing. And Queensland is actually quite far ahead and quite innovative in this area compared to Victoria. So I spoke a couple of weeks ago to one of your counterparts in the A, b, C in Ballarat, Gav, McGraw, and we were talking about a proposal Jeff Kent came up with to have relocation and working farms. And Queensland actually has that. You have relocation communities and relocation options. It's at a very early pilot stage and it's mainly focused at Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander youth offenders who are at risk of serious re-offending.
But that model of matching people who would be suited to that kind of order with rural environments, real jobs that need to be filled. You've got cattle stations and rural leases here in Queensland that are crying out to try to fill job vacancies and skills that they're missing out on. Those kind of communities are taking or could potentially take young people who are at risk of re-offending out their environment away from their networks of influence and offending and put them in a scenario where they can have positive role models where they can earn money and where they can actually reflect and have that circuit breaker. So I think that's a terrific idea that solves quite a number of problems and could do so in a much more meaningful way. With prison, often what you're doing is you're not making the community safer, you're just warehousing the problem and you're pushing the problem down the road.
And prisons have always been, and will probably always be finishing schools and places where young people who might have gone on a bender and stolen some cars and crashed some cars and then gotten arrested, go to prison, suddenly they're meeting serious criminals with serious criminal connections. If they didn't go into prison with a serious drug habit, they often leave with one because in prison all of these things are sometimes more available and people don't fully understand that. I think they think prison is an environment where it's easy to be abstinent to avoid drug and alcohol use. It's just as hard if not harder as the real world, but you are really putting people in this pressure cooker environment where they're finding role models and structure but not necessarily the kind that society should want them to have.
Steve Austin:
My guest is Jordan Dilo. You want judges to have more discretion. Queensland is a bit going the other way. We've sort of tightened laws where judges have sort mandatory sentencing roles where we've tightened up on judges, but I think you want judges to have broader range of options available to them for sentencing a young offender. Is that right?
Jordan Dittloff:
Well, from my understanding, Queensland sort of has a bit of a schizophrenic approach where it has both things. It has some offences where there is a minimum, sorry, there is a minimum mandatory sentence. And then they have another law which was passed that says, prison is a last resort now, which is it. And if you're a magistrate and trying to navigate that system, what options are you really left with? And look, I know in my circumstance and the vast majority of guys I met in prison, there's the old trope that there's no guilty people in prison and that everyone thinks they didn't do it or thinks they were hard done by. The truth is that's actually very much the opposite, that most people in prison not only pretty much agree with the sentence they received, but by the time they've been through the system a bit, they could pretty much tell you what you were going to get. I had guys tell me what my sentence was going to be two months before I got sentenced and it was within a month margin of error. So
Steve Austin:
The criminals are pretty good lawyers.
Jordan Dittloff:
Look, they can be good jailhouse lawyers, but I think that judges have a vast amount of experience. They have to navigate and distil a wide range of considerations. And I think that more often than not, when they're given the flexibility and freedom to do so and they're given options and creativity and the sort of youth diversion order I'm talking about would be another arrow in the quiver that they could choose from and navigate between. And in Victoria it's heading in a direction where rather than really address what options there are other than jail where looking at a scenario where the criminal age of responsibility itself is being changed, the idea that until the age of 14 a young person can't be criminally responsible is an idea that is well on its way to being implemented in Victoria. And I think that's really, really concerning because there are some 12 year olds that would be very, very incapable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions. But there are other 12 year olds that could very well with full knowledge and full understanding of what they're doing, commit terrible crimes. And I think that if the more you take away discretion, the harder it is to reflect the realities and complications of life.
Steve Austin:
My guess is Jordan Dilo, he's actually in Brisbane for the weekend. I'll give you some details where he's speaking at a couple of different events in just a moment. This is a BC radio Brisbane. Steve Austin's my name. You are now a law graduate. You're working at a law firm in Victoria where you did postgraduate law studies at Deakin University. How much money have you paid back to your victims so far?
Jordan Dittloff:
So I began repaying victims of my offending probably eight or nine months into my prison term. At the time I was earning $50 a month from my prison wage and I basically sent all of that out to the county according Geelong to start the process of making repayments. And as soon as I did that, I slept better at night. My conscience started to ease and I was able to, when I got out of prison, walk down the street with my head up, knowing I was doing everything I can. I've now repaid around $33,000. It's a bit over 12 and a half, 13%. And as I've improved my life and been able to rebuild, I've been able to repay more and I've got concrete plans to continue doing that and to finish off repaying victims of my offending.
Steve Austin:
That's a remark. I've never heard that story before. Do they say anything when they start to get money back? I mean they were your victims of crime, did they say anything?
Jordan Dittloff:
So I make payments through the county court in Geelong. I don't have direct interactions with my victims, and I think I've always taken the view that there was a time in my life when I interacted with these people where my word was worth very little. So I would rather do, sorry, justifiably. Yeah, absolutely. I would rather do sorry than say sorry. And I think that it's also, even though I am working to repay the harm I caused them, it also can't be about, it can't be selfishly about me. I can't be doing it so that they will forgive me or so that they will think favourably of me. There are probably many people in the community of Colac that I harmed in Victoria who will probably never think I've changed or will probably always think of me the way I was. And if my recovery and my steps towards rehabilitation are contingent on other people's perception of me, that's a very dangerous path to set yourself on. But it also keeps things not about me, but I think that the legal system has a way of framing things where according to the system, once you've done your time, once you've served your sentence, that's it. The slate's clean. And that's not how society is. That's not how human nature is. You can't legislate forgiveness and there's so much more to rehabilitation than simply the legal rehabilitation. There's moral rehabilitation and social rehabilitation, and that work begins once your prison sentence finishes.
Steve Austin:
I really appreciate you coming in and telling your story. Jordan, thanks so much.
Jordan Dittloff:
Thanks very much Steve.
Steve Austin:
Jordan Dittloff and I should mention, so he's in Brisbane this weekend. He's speaking at a political event on Sunday at the Royal Mail room at the Tin GPA Hotel here in Brisbane. It's a community political movement called Voting Matters. Jordan Ditol is one of the speakers at that event. We can pass on the contact details of Jewel Burbage if you want details of that, but he's actually speaking on Sunday this weekend just after midday at the Tin GPA hotel with a range of other political figures. Actually, before I let you go, I think you're involved in politics a bit yourself in the Libertarian party. Why have you got involved in politics? Jordan did love.
Jordan Dittloff:
Well, politics was always a part of my life. It's always been something I've been passionate about before prison, it probably wasn't a healthy thing for me because my life was very unmanageable and I wasn't living according to my values. But for me, libertarian ideals is all about the unqualified respect for the life project of others. And the libertarian ideal is all about optimism, about the idea that people are fundamentally good or capable of being good and changing, and the idea that in general, people should be free to regulate their lives and do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't hurt others and that most people are best positioned to decide what's the right thing for them.
Steve Austin:
Thanks for coming in.
Jordan Dittloff:
Thank you.
Steve Austin:
Jordan Dittloff. So he'll be speaking, I'll give you details a little bit later on. One of my listeners says, "finally, thank you, Jordan, for so articulately discussing what I feel strongly about around these issues. Now for the powers that be to actually listen." Another listener says, "yep, plenty of studies so that people require community connection. Connection can come from family, friends, or drugs and alcohol". Another listener says, "do magistrates have too much discretion? Should the government implement mandatory sentences for violent crimes?"
