Prison system failed my son

I WENT OUT TO PICK HIM UP ... AND I DROVE STRAIGHT PAST HIM. I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS HIM.

A HOBART woman says the prison system has failed her mentally ill, substance-addicted, and sometimes incarcerated adult son.

“Rosie”, who spoke to the

Mercury anonymously to protect her son’s identity, says the 41-year-old bipolar sufferer sometimes lives in St David’s Park, is bashed up at least once a fortnight, and is often seriously psychologically unwell and delusional.

She said her son blended his bipolar medication with illicit drugs and alcohol and continued to get into trouble with the law and mixed up with criminals despite her best attempts to help him — simply because Tasmania does not have appropriate systems to help men like him.

Rosie said her son’s health started rapidly deteriorating in his mid to late-30s after he went to jail for drink driving and underwent a profound personal grief.

While he had been involved with drugs since his teen years, and possibly had mental health conditions even earlier, Rosie said things went from bad to worse after her son’s first stint in prison, when he spent the entire time in lockdown due to a lack of staff. He also was nearly sexually assaulted.

She said the only service her son responded well to was Alcoholics Anonymous — but the organisation did not visit Risdon.

She said on the occasions he was released on bail, for crimes like theft and burglary, there wasn’t a suitable rehabilitation facility for him in Hobart.

Rosie tried to take her son to Missiondale in the North, but he broke the no-mobile phone rule and was kicked out, after having been on a waiting list for six months.

She was not allowed to send him to an interstate facility because his bail conditions precluded him from leaving Tasmania — so Rosie has simply watched, powerless, as her son deteriorates each time he is released from jail.

She said he was sometimes bashed by a group of homeless men who went on stealing sprees on pension day.

“When I saw him a month ago, he rang and asked me to pick him up, and I went out to pick him up near Kmart somewhere, and I drove straight past him. I had no idea it was him. He wasn’t drunk, he was just off, edgy, and his face and arms … very swollen; cuts, bruises all over him. It was like pulp, his face,” Rosie said.

“He looked to me like he was swollen all over.”

She said he went through periods of being seriously mentally unwell, spouting off conspiracy theories and reeling off false memories from his childhood.

“When he’s on the low part of the cycle, or the high part — whichever one makes him more difficult — nobody wants to know him and he’s dreadful with police.”

She said even though her son had useful and practical skills, these could not be utilised at Risdon following the

closure of the Hayes Prison Farm.

The prison is also suffering from chronic overcrowding following the recent reclassification of long-term minimum inmates back into maximum security following the prison breaks in September.

“I thought the whole idea of prisons was to rehabilitate people so that they could come out and live a good life, but we don’t rehabilitate them,” Rosie said.

“They don’t have rehabilitation because it would break their budget, but if we rehabilitated them, they wouldn’t go back.”

Rosie said the long-term stress had affected her entire family.

“I have weeks where I don’t come out of the house, when it’s really bad,” she said.

“I used to lie awake, night after night after night.”

She said she often cried for the son she feels she’s lost.

“You have these moments when you remember them, and the little face so expectant, and he was going to do this and he was going to do that, and the moments he was successful and he had his life ahead of him — and now it’s all gone.”