My first Post

So here it is, my first post to my first blog. To be honest, I've not been one for blogs, I hardly read them, so would I want to start one? What is the purpose of a Blog? More importantly, who wants to read this? This last thought was the main one that ran through my mind, but yet here I am, starting a blog, to share my thoughts and views on the world at large. Then came my next thought, what would I blog about? I cast about to find a subject, yet nothing seemed to come to mind. But then this week an event occured that did catch my attention, and it has since driven me, as the saying goes, up the wall.

This week, a convicted killer was murdered in prison. It's become a media sensation. Why? Why is it such a newsworthy item that he was killed? Yes he had been a major player in the Melbourne underworld, and was serving a rather lenghty sentence, so why all the hype? Tributes have been flowing into a Facebook page set up by someone to mourn his passing! This is a man, who sold drugs to young people, runining their lives, arranged the murders of people, and rose to be a kingpin of the criminal underworld, and he suddenly has cult status.

It seems to be a growing trend to attach to people like this a sense of hero or cult status, and their lives are suddenly a talking point. The underbelly television series is a case in point, glamourizing the underworld in Australia, and the people that it foucus around suddenly have more power and respect than most public figures. In comparison, the Police forces of Australia are receiving less and less respect, as young people start to follow the examples of their idols from underbelly. Drugs which are now so freely available to people have become such an epidemic have added to this, changing people's personalities, to the point where they start to break more and more laws to either feed their addiction, or just for the excitment and rush it gives them, and this puts them into direct contact with the Police, often in a violent manner. We hear more on the news of Police failures or disgraced officers than we do of their successes.

So why should one man, sentanced for thirty years and killed in prison, warrent all the media attention in the investigations into his murder? Simply because bad news sells. Criminals with this kind of cult status sells news, alive or dead. I will point out now that I am myself part of the Department of Justice, and so I will admit that I am somewhat biased. But in all of this, I feel not for the prisoner who met his tragic end in a place that he felt secure, nor for his freinds and family as they had all made their choices that led to nearly all of them doing prison time, no, I feel for the Staff that were working that day. Staff who manned that unit, staff who did their best to save him, staff who now, will be feeling that the finger of blame may be pointed at them as the investgations go on. They will all now be feeling the pressure, and it's them who I feel for the most. All of them are just people doing a job that not many people want. These are the people I work with, day in day out and I stand by them. To me, all this event warrented in the media was a breif passing, and have it left at that, not making it in the sensationalized event that it has become. The amount of sepculation and faulty facts that the media seem to have based thier information on has driven me up the wall. Not one news agency seems to be able to get their facts right, and no one in the public would be none the wiser. It's not my place to point those out or to comment on them, very far from it. I am just merely stunned as to why the media have latched onto this has much as they have. And not just to this, but to any major criminal figure. Crime it seems, does pay, when the price is right to the right media group. With such large sums for criminals or even their parteners to tell their story, who wouldn't want to be them? But then, what of the price paid by the many innocent people whose lives are runined by the drugs they sell, or are hurt in the violence that spills over from the fights between rival groups? There is a price to be paid for all of these stories and lifestyles of the criminal underworld, one that we seem to be willing pay, but I wonder, for how long?