CHEAP DRUGS AND HURRIED JUSTICE PUT THE SYSTEM IN THE DOCK

As politicians fight over policy, the drug trade is pushing the
justice system to the limit. Bernard Lagan joins a magistrate, a
lawyer and a probation officer on the front line at Fairfield Local
Court.

Their justice begins in the chute. Prisoners follow its narrow,
corrugated iron walls and low curved roof from the police station
cells on Fairfield's Smart Street, through back alleys to the rear of
the Local Court.

From a door behind the dock people are produced, handcuffed and
blinking, into the fresh light of magistrate Kevin Flack's
wood-panelled courtroom.

For a few the walk will be a walk to freedom. For many others it will
be the beginning of freedom's loss. They will walk back down the chute
and into the glass and steel cages, the police cells.

They will be given a burger from McDonald's for lunch, then while away
the rest of the day, awaiting the white truck that does the evening
run to Silverwater jail or the women's prison, Mulawa.

On Smart Street the shoppers, store owners and scurrying commuters
will know little of the business of justice that day. They might see
the frequent spats outside the court on Spencer Street; the warring
couple who troop, sullen, back into court to have it confirm their
agreement to meet at the railway station on Saturdays for child access
visits; or the tearful Vietnamese girl, charged with supplying heroin,
scream at her mother: "I am not going into court. They will send me to
jail."

This is justice on the city's south-west fringes, a system stretched
to the edges of tolerance.

The State Government will release a report this week showing that
criminal charges to be heard in local courts have increased by more
than 13 per cent in the past year, causing six-month delays before
matters can be heard.

Cabramatta, still the place to go for cheap heroin, where 35 people
have died of overdoses in the past year, is within the Fairfield
police and court district.

It is a place where Bob Carr's promise to return station-bound police
to the streets didn't happen; most days, between four and six police
officers are pulled off the streets to mind the 20 or so prisoners
crammed into cells awaiting court appearances. Department of
Corrective Services staff were supposed to take over, but there is no
money.

Nor is there enough to provide a second interview room where lawyers
such as Legal Aid's Paul Hayes can speak to prisoners.

Tucked away, the Fairfield court has its own cells; they are unusually
clean because they're not used. Their design and lack of surveillance
cameras are considered a danger to inmates.

Kevin Flack, in his late 50s and the State's longest-serving
magistrate, might shrug off the day by going to evening meetings of
the NSW Hockey Association.

The court's police prosecutor, Sergeant Ric Thompson, 43, will go home
to his three young boys, hoping they will never join those he prosecutes.

The harassed but always polite Legal Aid lawyer, Paul Hayes, 36, may
be troubled by a case from the day. He will try to put it to rest as
he travels home to his family.

Vietnamese probation officer Ambrose Dinh won't go home until late. He
will meet into the night in Fairfield with Vietnamese drug users and
others to see if they can change their ways and stay out of jail.

The single-storey Fairfield Local Court, opened 30 years, is the
State's sixth busiest - on a par with larger courts at Liverpool and
Blacktown.

Fuelled by drug use in Cabramatta, it has the State's highest
frequency of drug offenders. About 80 per cent of people who appear -
whether they're already in custody and enter via the chute or come
through the front doors on less serious offences - are on drug-related
charges.

Interpreters are frequently needed to explain charges to people
bewildered by a courtroom.

Many steal to support heroin use. Others get caught using or selling.
Many get picked up for wandering into Cabramatta's backyards; they
usually deny they're there to shoot up.

Trespass in Cabramatta has become a favoured police charge to target
suspected drug users forced off the streets into back yards.

"I was just taking a short cut to the station," a 19-year-old man told
Mr Flack last week.

The magistrate, a big-framed father of four, who started out as a
clerk in Griffith in the mid-1950s and went to night school to finish
law, has heard most excuses in 25 years on the Bench.

The youth forgot he had admitted to police he was in Cabramatta to use
heroin. After convicting him on the trespass charge, Flack urged the
young man, well built and wearing clean jeans and a jumper, to seek
help. The young man enthusiastically agreed.

The magistrate slowly shook his head and his eyes trailed the young
man leaving court.

Perhaps he would seek help. There are plenty who won't or who have
tried and failed.

Kylie, 20, stared at the floor from the dock. She had a soft,
attractive face and fidgeted with her blonde hair while her lawyer
tried to prevent her becoming another statistic. A third of Sydney
women prisoners came from three just suburbs. Fairfield is one.

The charges against her were serious. She had helped to hide an
escapee despite her own lengthy record for drug-related crime. Bail
was refused and she was returned to the cells.

Later Mr Flack says he suspects Kylie is an addict but believes she
will have access to help in jail and, in time, stop committing so many
offences.

Gary - tall, sullen and softly spoken - was luckier. He had spent a
night in the cells after bashing up a stranger in a phone booth. He
had considered the man was talking too loudly.

Gary has a long record of violence and it looked like he was heading
back to jail but, after reading a probation officer's report which
disclosed sexual abuse while a child, and a clean record for the past
six years, Mr Flack gave him a suspended jail term. If Gary reoffends
he will go to jail.

"He probably should have gone to jail ... but I took a punt, I guess,"
the magistrate says later.

For others, his decision is swift.

A 22-year-old man who looks 10 years older shivers and jerks in the
dock, his green prison-issue tracksuit hanging off thin limbs. He'd
been spotted the night before in Cabramatta in a stolen car and
crashed it during a police chase.

His history: cast out of his country NSW home at 14 after a run-in
with his mother's new boyfriend, he left for Cabramatta with his older
sister and was quickly introduced to heroin.

Addicted, he lived as a street kid and wandered in and out of
institutions and drug-treatment programs. He slumps in the dock, eyes
down cast. Mr Flack has declined bail and he will go back to jail to
await sentencing.

He is the kind of case that causes despair on the Bench and within the
police.

Sergeant Ric Thompson, trained as a teacher, for a time studied law,
joined the police and worked his way through the ranks to become a
prosecutor. He has the outwardly taciturn manner of a cop who spent
years on the streets, but is not without sympathy for those he prosecutes.

He fears there is a social underclass developing which, though not
ethnically based, will be hard to break up. "You see people who will
wash up as statistics," Sergeant Thompson says.

Paul Hayes, the tousle-haired chief of the Legal Aid Commission in
Fairfield, works the police cells and the court's public areas, daily
seeking out those who need legal assistance. He finds the job inspiring.

He is conscious of the relatively high rate of burnout among Legal Aid
lawyers but he spurns the alternative of a better-paid job in a law
firm, saying: "I don't like dealing with money, full stop. I don't
like to ask people for money."

Many Legal Aid clients he sees are Vietnamese, and he's developed a
great sympathy for them: "Many have had fairly horrific lives ...
jails here certainly don't hold too much of a deterrence.

"When you look at the hardships they have in relation to employment,
language difficulties, family break-ups, it's not unusual that there
would be a tendency to head toward prohibited substances."

Kevin Flack sees little evidence that the State is managing to reduce
the heroin problems in Sydney's south-west.

"It's the purity of the heroin and the cheapness of it and easy supply
that are matters that make it difficult and dangerous," he says. "I
don't know that we are making much headway."

Others, however, see hope in Fairfield.

Each Monday night, Ambrose Dinh, who fled Vietnam aboard a small boat
for Australia 25 years ago, meets with as many as 15 Vietnamese drug
users in a little room adjoining the Fairfield Probation and Parole
Service office.

They are mostly people who've been sentenced by the court to community
service, under the direction of probation officers such as Dinh.

Invariably, they put on their best clothes for the evening, listen to
each other attentively and will share a takeaway meal. They will meet
like this for 10 weeks.

It is a source of great joy to Dinh that about a third will get off
drugs during his course. Those who don't will again be at the mercy of
the pushers in an area where there is little affordable
rehabilitation.

A colleague in the Fairfield probation service, George Muscat, once a
Catholic priest, has been dealing with drug users and those who commit
drug-related crime for more than two decades.

He often wonders if he is making progress, but says an experience last
week encouraged him. It concerned a 22-year-old woman who had been in
and out of the court for two years because she consistently failed to
complete 20 hours' community service.

Last week she finished a 10-week group course run by Muscat, and he
presented her with a certificate.

"She said that was the first time in her life she had ever completed
anything and then she started to cry," he said. "This is what people
don't see out here."

Neither Kevin Flack, Paul Hayes, Ric Thompson nor George Muscat claim
to have any fresh solutions for Fairfield's problems. They are people
who try to make a stretched system work each day.

Says Paul Hayes: "Winning is not what it is about. It's about ensuring that
the system does, at the end of the day, spit out justice."