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The Day I Spoke to a Child Killer: What I Learned About Evil Working in the Australian Prison System
Human evil is a subject of eternal fascination. True crime remains among the most popular of genres, and our entertainment is full of fictional serial killers and villains. Our attention seems to endlessly revolve around the likes of Hitler, Dahmer, Voldemort, Sauron and Lecter. It’s a fascination I shared for many years.
Then, between 2000 and 2005, I worked for an organisation that provided counselling, welfare and other social work services to offenders and their families. It was the most eye-opening, fascinating and difficult job I ever had. I worked with what many people would describe as the scum of the earth: armed robbers, murderers, sex offenders, fraudsters, burglars and everything in between. In the process I learned that evil is not what I had imagined.
Even though we were a charity, we received almost no private donations. We weren’t exactly the Make-A-Wish Foundation; we couldn’t rustle up an army of volunteers to stand on street corners asking for gold coin donations to help a crim get back on his feet. In fact we constantly battled a headwind of prejudice against the entire notion of supporting people who had been exiled from the community for the bad things they had done. We were trying to help offenders who were returning to the…
