Extract from ABC News
Carolyn Crawford was 64 when she was sent to prison. Before that, she had never even had a parking fine.
But an addiction to the lights and sounds of pokies rooms drove her to lie and steal.
Over several years, Ms Crawford pilfered $400,000 from her employer to feed her addiction.
She told her family she was visiting friends, when she was sitting alone in front of a machine, gambling her life away.
"I was a very good liar," she said.
"How many times a week can you go grocery shopping? How many friends can you have?"
She said she would sit in a 'mindless' state, pushing the buttons.
"Nobody knew how bad it was, but then again I didn't either," Ms Crawford said.
From pokies to prison
She said that, even at night, the sounds of the poker machines would ring through her mind.
She lived alone and the local venues offered atmosphere, company and even a discounted dinner.
She said the first thing she would think about when she woke up each day was where she would go that night, hardly ever thinking about her family.
When her boss found she had been putting money from the company account into her own, she was fired. Police arrested her a few days later.
"I was ready to just die," she said,
"Mind you, many times after I'd been to the pokies, afterwards I'd want to die.
"The only thing that would stop me was my family, I wouldn't do that to them."
When the judge in the Melbourne County Court handed down her 18-month prison sentence, she shook, crying. So did her family.
She hugged them goodbye and was taken away, before arriving at Dame Phyllis Frost Correctional Centre.
"You're stripped, you're searched, you've got to do the bend and part to check you haven't got any drugs, which is embarrassing at my age," Ms Crawford said.
After a short stint at the maximum-security prison she was sent to a minimum-security women's prison.
At no point was gambling addiction addressed as a mental health issue, as it would have been if she was addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Tackling gambling head on
In 2015, South Australia's Magistrates' Court system became the first in Australia to recognise gambling addiction as a contributing factor to crime.
The Gambling Court is a branch of the Treatment Intervention Court and has strict eligibility conditions, requiring a guilty plea and mandatory treatment programs.
Each offender is allocated a case manager and appears before the court regularly to discuss and monitor their progress, keeping them out of jail.
It includes a 12-week Cognitive Behavioural Therapy based outpatient treatment program.
The intensive program also involves graded cue exposure, which takes participants into gaming venues, while monitoring their heart rate.
Alternatively, clients can opt for a two-week intensive inpatient treatment at Flinders Medical Centre.
Problem among women
Ms Crawford said about 75 per cent of the women with her in prison were there as a result of gambling addiction.
Now a free woman, she spends her time advocating and performing with a theatre group called Three Sides of the Coin, which helps to tell the stories of people with gambling addiction.
She has even returned to prison to perform for the latest cohort of women.
Ms Crawford, along with gambling reform advocates, are calling on a change to justice systems throughout Australia.
'Crack-cocaine' of gambling
Dr Mark Halloran was Ms Crawford's treating psychologist in prison and helped many women overcome their addiction. He also worked at other prisons in northern Victoria.
He said that usually in men's prisons, drug use or alcoholism went hand-in-hand with gambling.
"Methamphetamine use and gambling tend to go quite well," Dr Halloran said.
"They'd be using meth and dealing, and any money they were making from dealing they were putting into the poker machine."
But in the women's prison, gambling addiction often started after a traumatic event in an otherwise normal life.
He believes the justice system needs to broaden its understanding of gambling addiction.
"They call poker machines the crack-cocaine of gambling because they're really designed to operate on the reward pathways," Dr Halloran said.
"They're designed to be highly addictive by stimulating dopaminergic neurons, because they're built around a variable schedule meaning the rewards are unpredictable.
"It also gives them an escape from stress and the distress they have in their life, it creates a form of mindlessness when they're sitting there."
Profiting from poverty
Veteran Gippsland lawyer Mark Woods has represented hundreds of people who have stolen from employers, family members, organisations and government departments as a result of gambling addiction.
His local government area is one of the most disadvantaged in Australia and yet $136,833 was lost on the pokies everyday between 2022 and 2023, according to data from the Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission.
"We see this really far too often," Mr Woods said.
"This is an area where hope springs eternal if you have an income which doesn't meet your needs, and unfortunately more and more people turn to gambling.
"As a rehabilitation tool, prison is useless, it’s supposed to be a deterrent."
Mr Woods believes the court system needs to introduce a specific gambling court to not only to prevent future offending, but also to learn from.
"Then we would know rehabilitation efforts were targeted and we would learn so much more about how to target problem gamblers," Mr Woods said.
"Then we should go some way to ensuring it reduces rather than increases."
Gambling researcher Dr Angel Rintoul believes it's high time gambling disorder was recognised as a medical condition.
In a landmark study with the Coroner's Court of Victoria, Dr Rintoul found four per cent of suicides were related to gambling.
"We have drug courts for people who engage in criminal activity because of their drug problems and we need to recognise gambling in the same way," Dr Rintoul said.
A year on from the Inquiry into Gambling Harm, the federal government is yet to deliver its response to the recommendations handed down.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Victorian government said Victoria had the strongest gambling harm protections in Australia.
The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether it would consider a targeted gambling court and how much the government receives in gambling taxes each year.
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