DRUGS NOW A FACTOR IN ALMOST ALL CRIME

The Melbourne Magistrates Court, the engine-room of the Victorian
court system, is now effectively a drug court, its senior magistrates
say.

According to deputy chief magistrate Jelena Popovic, between 80 and
90 per cent of criminal matters coming before the court are related
to drug addiction.

"The reality is that magistrates courts are drug courts," she told
The Sunday Age. "I don't think people have any conception of how much
crime is directly related to drug dependency.

"People are stealing candy bars for sustenance because they have
spent their money on drugs. Yesterday I had someone in court for
stealing a $1.87 drink from a 7-Eleven. And the reason behind many
car thefts is that people are stealing them to sleep in rather than
for joy-riding."

Fellow magistrate Barbara Cotterell said a high percentage of
shoplifting was also associated with raising money for drugs.

"Addicts steal large quantities of razors and shampoo, things that
they can sell easily." Ms Cotterell said she had also noted an
increase in the number of drug-trafficking charges. "People are
charged with trafficking if they are caught with one foil, and
they're selling half of it to fund their own habit. That is
trafficking but it is at the lighter end of the scale."

Court statistics do not reflect the extent of drug-related crime,
said Ms Popovic, one of Victoria's three deputy chief magistrates.
"The number of people charged with actual possession and use of drugs
is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth of the matter is that most
home burglaries and burglaries on commercial premises are committed
in order to finance drug habits. So are car thefts.

"You also need to include the statistics on `obtaining financial
advantage by deception', which is often people selling stolen goods
to second-hand shops. We would love to gather statistics (which
included the background of particular crimes). But the court doesn't
have the resources to do that."

She said the figure of 80 to 90 per cent of cases being drug-related
might be lower in some suburban courts. "But Melbourne takes in
Richmond, Kensington, Flemington, Fitzroy and Collingwood, which are
hot spots."

Ms Popovic said the prevalence of drug-created crime had led the
court to change its approach from one of retribution or punishment to
"harm minimisation".

The days when "career criminals" dominated the courts were over. "The
individuals before us are far more complicated," she said.
"Drug-addicted people are often homeless or may have intellectual
disabilities or psychiatric problems. So sentencing is far more
complex. It is not simply punishing people for using drugs. It is
trying to examine the causes leading up to offending, to see if they
can be ameliorated in order to decrease their offending."

Ms Popovic denied that the new direction was "soft on drugs".

"It's the opposite. We are trying to speed up the process of
decreasing people's drug use and (helping them) abstain in order to
protect the community," she said.

In practice, this meant that magistrates were slowing down the legal
process and spending more time on cases, Ms Popovic said.

"The tendency is not to simply dispose of cases on the first hearing
date, but to adjourn cases several times to give people the
opportunity to live up to what they're telling us they're going to do
(by attending detoxification or rehabilitation centres)." Young drug
offenders were being referred to the court-run CREDIT program, which
offered them rehabilitation treatment and support as a bail condition
immediately after their arrest. There was also a deferred sentencing
program, under which a sentence could be deferred up to six months
while the person convicted sought treatment.

Ms Cotterell said magistrates had become much more creative in their
sentencing. "The aim is to allow people the opportunity to
rehabilitate themselves. And you couldn't put every person charged
with drug trafficking in jail because the prisons wouldn't hold them."

Ms Popovic said the courts were not being clogged by the increasing
numbers of drug-related cases because the kinds of matters that used
to fill the lists were now being dealt with by fines or other means,
while police regularly "cautioned" first-time heroin and marijuana
offenders. "We are managing," she said.