Heroin addiction can be a horrible affliction, a little understanding can go a long way to helping address the issue. (Image from Psychonaught)
It was one of the strangest prisoner interviews I’ve done in a while. Just me and a shoplifter who had already admitted taking spirits from a shop and was now telling me all about why she had done it.
For the interview itself, the confession was what I’d needed.
Yes, she’d taken the goods. No, she hadn’t any reason to think that she could take whiskey and vodka from the shelves without paying for them and yes, had she have got away with it she would have quickly sold the bottles.
Points to prove for a theft covered.
It’s at this point that the interview would usually finish but as I’d asked whether there was anything else she wanted to tell me, it being her interview, she’d propped herself up and opened up about not what she had done but why.
There’s a heroin habit that needs to be fed. A methadone prescription helps to an extent but it doesn’t see her through the whole day. Drinking her prescription in the morning under supervision of a pharmacist, come the afternoon the ‘rattling’ sensation returns leaving her with a gap that she has little choice but to fill by scoring.
The alternative is a crippling sickness as withdrawal symptoms take over, compelling her to find another fix and not letting her think about anything else until she has done so.
This means stealing although as she has suggested, as have many others to me whilst in similar interviews, she doesn’t want to be out running the risk of getting arrested for theft. She doesn’t want the hours spent in police cells, the drugs are the sole reason that she’s here.
The alternative she tells me is prostitution and the sexual abuse at the hands of rough, uncaring punters that inevitably follows. The shops closed, this is sometimes her only option and the sad stories she tells me about life on the streets I know are repeated across the country night on night.
She shows me her arms and the collapsed veins faintly visible under her needle scarred skin. Only the worn look in her eyes offer any real explanation for the premature ageing of her body, the unpleasant realities of having to inject heroin reinforced when she contorts her arm around to demonstrate how she reaches her few remaining useful veins.
The story starts six years prior being handed a drug by a ‘friend’ which she had thought was more innocent than the heroin that it turned out to be.
Addiction quickly took hold and took over, the years that followed were marked by consistent dependence on the drug, largely untroubled by spells in rehab.
It can be very difficult in our job to know what to think about some of the people we come into contact with. Addiction, poverty and unfortunate circumstances push people to do some terrible things. It’s easy to label someone as a ‘junkie’ or a ‘drunk’ and slam the cell door.
From time to time we are presented with timely reminders that the question of why is just as important as what and that there’s always room for understanding, for compassion.
Having listened to the girl’s account and her acknowledgement that people think she’s ‘just another junkie’, it was clear to me that there’s no such thing.
A really good incite into the causes of crime and offending, but one I suspect many of us could predict.
From my perspective I would suggest that this was in fact how all interviews should be, the main question should be ‘why’. Only if we see our only purpose as get convictions is the necessity of the interview to gather evidence and admissions.
If our purpose is to prevent crime from occurring, keep people safe, prevent reoffending, protect our communities, then it will always be right to ask the ‘why’ question. Because only when we know the answer that can we start to learn what to do to prevent it.
In my force our aim is ‘be safe, feel safe’, your observation would lead me to ask, so having learnt what you did what did you do to change the situation?
I think more than anything this was a useful reminder of how important the work of the drugs intervention charities is as if we want to break the cycle and the addict is genuinely wanting to get clean, they’re the people with the expertise and experience to make it happen.
Rich
“The alternative is a crippling sickness as withdrawal symptoms take over, compelling her to find another fix and not letting her think about anything else until she has done so.
This means stealing …”
Your mistake is to believe what you’re being told by a self-confessed thief. The real effects of opiate withdrawl (as opposed to the effects that addicts would have you believe) are relatively insignificant and in no way explain why anyone would resort to crime.
The real answer to the question of ‘Why’ remains the same as it always has: it beats working for a living.
Maybe I’ve misinterpreted your meaning but if you’re implying people would choose the life of a sex worker as a simple alternative to having to find employment then I strongly disagree. Furthermore I’ve spent many shifts in hospitals with people suffering from the consequences of sudden withdrawal and they’re very visible and very real.
Rich
No you haven’t misunderstood me, some people choose alternative ways of life: prostitute (sex worker if it makes you feel better), thief, robber, beggar etc.
If you don’t try hard at school, have sex with the first person you meet, experiment with drink and drugs from an early age and don’t try to stick at a job, you’re making a series of choices which will inevitably end up with you begging a policeman not to send you to jail because you have a ‘babby’ to look after.
Save your sympathy for the real victims.
There but for fortune…yes, it’s an awful way to live and no, she can’t be allowed to steal to fund it, no matter how hard her life is. But compassion doesn’t cost anything and she had nothing to gain in talking as she did – she’d already admitted what she’d done. I doubt she comes across a great deal of compassion in her life. What’s wrong with listening, helping if possible?
How easy to sit atop the high moral ground, this is another human being, surely deserving of our charitable understanding, hope she can get some help to get her life back on track, what would anyone choose this kind of life.