Welcome to Paradise E-Book

Isabel Stepanik

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Isabel Stepanik was barely 20 when she left her large warm extended family in Peru and crossed the world to Australia. It was the seventies and she found a country where men wore long socks and shorts, ‘siestas’ were unheard of, and the streets were empty after 5 – very different from the lively culture she had left behind. The young Peruvian adventurer planned to just stay for two years. She never dreamed that she would make Australia her home, and certainly not that she would end up spending much of her working life behind the walls of Sydney’s prisons, first as a welfare officer and later as a psychologist. Isabel’s story is one of culture shock, and of a young woman’s determination to succeed in a new country. It’s also the story of life inside prison walls, of the realities and challenges of trying to help inmates to turn their lives around. It’s the story of a woman who believes everyone deserves a second chance.

Leseprobe

Isabel Stepanik

Welcome to Paradise

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing about my life and work has been a long-held dream for me and I must thank many people for helping me make it a reality.

My heartfelt thanks to my beautiful daughters Jennifer and Vanessa. Jennifer’s example in writing her own books has inspired me along the way. Thank you both for being the “rock”, love, support and inspiration in my life.

Thanks too to my family, friends and colleagues for their interest and encouragement, whose privacy I wish to respect by not naming them here, but whose contributions to my life are greatly appreciated.

 I am also grateful for the time and patience of the many correctional service staff in South America and the USA who showed me a round and answered my many questions.

 And thank you too to the many inmates and clients I have dealt with over the years. In allowing me an insight into your lives and struggles you have given me a much broader and more compassionate view of what it means to be human. 

I must thank my editor, Annie Hastwell, for being so patient and committed to the editing of this book. I also must thank the following people who have shared with me their wisdom, love, support and compassion: Clair Marslen, Josephine Swiggs, Yuliya Richards, Fenia Kaufman, Saroja Srinivasan, Renate Wagner and Trang Thomas. 

And finally I want to thank my nine siblings: Freddy, Mery, Willy, Luis, Ofelia, Zully, Daniel, Flor and Rocio and all my family in Peru. Some of you are far away and we don’t see each other often enough but your love and support and the happy childhood we shared give me confidence and peace of mind.

Introduction

When I look back on my life I still can’t believe the series of strange coincidences that led me to work in the Australian prison system. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place in which a nice girl from Peru would have expected to end up, but my stubborn and determined personality has led me on an unconventional path through life. I don’t like being told I can’t do something, and when I found that as a woman and a migrant to this country, certain doors were closed to me, I just kept on knocking until they opened.

 I’ve called this book Welcome to Paradise because that’s a phrase I would hear often inside prisons. One high-ranking custodial officer I worked with used to say it cheerily to the recurring offenders, inmates that would keep coming back to gaol. "Oh, Jason, (or Bill, or Scott)”, he would say, “Welcome to Paradise. You like this place so much that you keep coming in here". The young inmates would have a big smile and would give us a lot of excuses why they were returning to gaol, but the truth was they usually took up using drugs and alcohol again as soon as they were released from gaol, and it wasn’t long before they were caught and ended up inside again.

 Welcome to Paradise is the story of a world that most Australians know nothing about, the somber world inside the walls of prisons. Working at first as a welfare officer and later as a psychologist, I spent hundreds of hours talking to inmates about their lives. I gained insight into how they think, and why they had ended up on the wrong side of the law. Over the years I came to realise that the way someone is treated in prison can make all the difference to what happens when they are released; whether they get their lives together, or go on to commit more crimes. 

I strongly believe that if a prisoner is given the opportunity to reflect on what they have done, if they are eager to change inwardly and are willing to take advantage of the professional help, psychologists, teachers and drug and alcohol counsellors, available within the Australian prison system, then there is real hope for them. 

All inmates, especially those with substance abuse, mental health or other problems, need help in order to be able to return to their communities at the end of their sentence. Imprisonment has an enormous impact on the person and his or her family. Most inmates leave gaol with no savings, no stable housing, and very limited job possibilities, so it is very hard for them to make a new start. Without adequate preparation and support for life after prison, the chances are high that they will just return to their former situations and lifestyles. This commonly means drug and alcohol use, possible infection with HIV, re-arrest and return to prison. Good rehabilitation within gaol offers the best hope of breaking this vicious cycle. 

As I became more deeply involved in my work within prisons, I grew more and more interested in how gaols are run. I visited similar institutions in Latin America, North America and England. No two were alike. In Latin America for example, prisoners don’t have TVs and many of the other comforts and opportunities that Australian prisoners have, but they are treated in a more human way. In North America some gaols are as big as cities, with one gaol holding as many people as are currently incarcerated in the whole of New South Wales. In checking out other systems I learnt that there are so many things that can be done to reduce the chances of all those people going back out into society and committing crimes again.

My job is not one that many people would want. Most Australians have hardened attitudes towards people who commit crimes and really couldn’t care less about what happens inside those walls. But my experience has shown me that there are so many reasons why a person ends up in gaol. I hope the stories in this book will remind readers that every person inside those walls is someone’s son, brother, husband or father. Gaol is somewhere they reflect on what they have done, but it should also be a place that offers them a second chance. 

The title of my book, Welcome to Paradise, also has meaning for me. As a very young woman I came to a strange country with no family, and not a word of the English language. Australia didn’t look too much like Paradise at first. I had to deal with homesickness and loneliness, and adjust to a completely different culture. It’s an experience many people share. I’m proud of my journey from those daunting beginnings to the happy life I lead now, and I hope my story can be a source of inspiration to others still learning to adjust to a new life in a new culture. I also wanted to leave, as a legacy to my children, siblings, family and friends, the story of how I ended up here. 

Note: Because I work in such a sensitive area I have taken care to protect the identities of the people whose stories I tell

CHAPTER ONE - How did I end up here?

It was August 1988 and my first day at Long Bay Correctional Centre. I was a young mother with two small girls at home and I’d come from a pleasant job as a typist at the Education Department. It was a big jump from that working environment to where I found myself now, in the prison system but this new job as a welfare officer was better paid, and I had been all the more determined to get it when a few barriers had been put in my way. “Your English is not good enough”, and “You’re a migrant and a woman”. I always rise to a challenge! 

But now that I was here the reality hit home.

 I was in a room with about six or seven men pretty tough-looking men sitting staring at me. Actually some were nervous because it was their first time in prison, but I wasn’t to know that. Others had the swagger and smirk of men used to the system. They were all from different backgrounds, Aboriginal, Islander, Asian, Anglo-Saxon. My job was to introduce myself and explain that I was there to offer them help and support with their families.

 I was suddenly stricken with stage fright and whispered to my other colleague, “No you do it”. It wasn’t till the fifth time I had to face such a roomful that I managed to get the words out: “Hi my name is Isabel and I am your Welfare Officer for this Remand section. I’m here to give you any assistance you may need regarding your wellbeing, contact with your family, seeking legal advice with your solicitor or if you need to be referred to other member of our team like a psychologist, nurse, or psychiatrist”. 

All inmates had to have a special number called a min number, and I had to tell them to put their name and number into the referral book if they wished to be seen. They would then start asking us questions. Some had been in and out of gaols many times, and sometimes seemed proud of it, saying things like “I’ve been to all of the gaols except Kirkconnell or Oberon”. 

That first day at Long Bay I really wondered how on earth I, a nice girl from Peru, had ended up there, behind prison walls in a country far from my home, with the job of helping these people who had run seriously off the rails. 

The reason I was in Australia at all goes back to a chance meeting with a traffic policeman many years earlier in Lima, Peru. I was 19 years old at the time and I had been working in a travel agency, a job that my godfather had found for me. At the time I was suffering a terrible disappointment after not gaining admittance to university, and had taken the job as a fill-in while I persevered with finding some other way to get into tertiary education. The travel agency was owned by Jewish people and they were sending students to Washington in the USA. I used to see lots of American tourists coming to our country and would dream of travelling to United States and learning the English language. To me, when those American people talked, it sounded so beautiful. 

I’d secretly hatched a plan to try to study somewhere overseas. Anywhere. On that day that my life’s direction changed I was on my way to the Austrian embassy in Lima, where I had an interview to see if they would offer me a student visa. I’d picked Austria at random; I knew nothing about the country, but I just wanted to get away from my own country and find any opportunity to study overseas. On my way to the embassy I’d got lost in the city, and when I asked a friendly cop he was curious about my destination. I briefly told him my story. 

Luckily for me he was a man with an opinion. “Why do you want to go to Austria?” he said. “Why don’t you go to Australia?” He then pointed to a big pink building up the road and said: “See that building over there, that’s the Australian embassy. They’re looking for young people like you”.