Care in the Community
There is nowt more chilling start to the day than knocking on a dilapidated door to an apartment above a boarded up shop. Eventually the door opens and a tousle haired fellow, half awake, beckons you inside.
The hallway is filled with black plastic bin bags, dozens of them, oozing brown liquid and a smell so noxious it could force Saddam Hussein out of hiding.
The curtains are drawn, the floorboards bare of covering. The entire East Anglian chapter of bluebottle flies are holding their annual convention on the slimey fridge top and roar off in angry procession at this unexpected early morning interruption.
‘Tea?’ says the tousle haired one.
You shift from foot to foot, carefully unsticking each shoe from the molasses that was once the kitchen lino.
‘Er, No thanks, just had one’ you cheerfully lie.
He seems friendly enough, amiable even. Unwashed, unshaven, probably about 30, looks fit enough.
‘I understand there’s a problem with the probate of your parent’s farm’, you say.
‘Yeah, yeah’ he says in a non-committal way.
‘Would you like to tell me about it’
And he does. He launches into a long disconnected ramble, which somewhere along the line mentions case law you dimly remember from the dreaded law finals.
The nub of the matter, he calmly tells you, is that he murdered his father, and his mother, who was present, died of shock.
It had meant a bit of a hiccup in probate of the estate. There is common law that you cannot inherit an estate where you have murdered the benefactor.
The case was going well he tells you, his ‘brief’ had proved to the court that there was no planning involved in the murder, he just ‘suddenly thought’ that whacking his father over the head several dozen times with a tyre lever was a good way to spend the morning. So it was manslaughter through diminished responsibility, not murder. Everything would be fine. They’d changed the law, you know, and he would still inherit the estate.
You hope and pray that he doesn’t ‘just suddenly think’ that whacking you over the head with a tyre lever might be on the cards for today, for it is still 8.30 in the morning, and there is not a soul about.
You remember the dozens of bin liners in the hallway, and wonder what they may contain.
‘Did you go to prison’ you ask, in a friendly, don’t want to upset you, needn’t answer if you don’t want to, sort of way.
‘Nah, they sent me to some dump up in Lancashire, soon sorted them out’
‘Er, the farm’s in ‘x’, and your living in East Anglia, why didn’t you go back to the farm? Who’s looking after the farm?’
‘Been over here picking strawberries’, he says, mentioning a strawberry farm just a bare mile and a half from your home.
‘But that’s miles from here’.
‘I sleep in my car; park it up in the woods there’
(Thinks, would that be the woods where I walk my dog every morning? Time for a new dog walking route.)
‘Have you got a social worker’ You ask.
‘Did have, she got right uppity, said she wouldn’t come back here ‘til the bags had gone’
‘Well, it might be an idea to put your rubbish out’ you say cautiously.
‘S’not out, its in, f**king burger bar next door, the f**king drunks leave burgers on me doorstep’
(Ah, decomposing hamburgers, that would account for the smell)
‘Then she got right upset when the Old Bill gave us me chain saw back’
‘Chainsaw?’ Arggghhh.
‘Mine innit?’
I was reminded of this fine example of ‘care in the community’ and the genial fellows that social workers – and surviving parents – are expected to look after as they revel in their ‘Human Rights and freedom for all’ by this tale.
Paranoid schizophrenic Leslie Gadsby, 38, was detained at a psychiatric hospital after killing his father, Arthur, 63, and seriously injuring his mother, Edna, in a frenzied attack with a claw hammer in 2004.
But he was freed under the care of mental health services and earlier this week allegedly stabbed his 70-year-old mother to death at his flat in Tuebrook, Liverpool.
Health chiefs have refused to reveal when and why Gadsby was released from hospital.
Last night politicians called for an urgent investigation into how Gadsby was allowed back into the community with such apparent freedom.
Why just Gadsby? There are dozens of Gadsbys out there in the community. Dozens? Hundreds? You just read about them in the papers, but someone, somewhere, has to call in and see them, invariably a relative, for social services are remarkably adept at ‘dropping them off their list’ for a myriad of reasons that never once mention ‘scared stiff of them’, and sometimes that person happens to call and see them the next time a ‘sudden thought’ drops into their tortured mind.
We call this progress. Those of us who live in Primrose Hill and like to think of new ways in which to use the Human Rights Act.
Those of us who have to drop in and out of their lives take a different viewpoint.
‘Care in the Community’ is a disgrace. We need ‘Care for the Community’.
No, I’ve no idea where he is now. Could be living just down the road from you.
UPDATE: I thought Scott Clinic rang a bell. They are the same muppets that let Graham Stridgeon out to play.
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1
April 2, 2010 at 10:48 -
Anna, I’m surprised at you being so ‘Risk Adverse’
It’s attiudes like this that are keeping convicted killers behind bars even though they’ve really, really promised not to do it again.
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April 2, 2010 at 10:49 -
All completely in accord with our rulers’ view of things. These dangerous creatures do not move within the sort of circles inhabited by our rulers, are not therefore a threat to anyone who matters, and should not be consuming taxpayers’ money (rulers’ money) being kept in any sort of institution.
Anna, casual observation of the application and practice of the law suggests that it does not exist primarily to protect our country’s citizens. It exists;
1) To protect privilege.
2) To provide the legal profession with a rich living.
3) To maintain a submissive taxpaying populace.
4) To protect wrongdoers from the natural consequences of their own acts. -
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April 2, 2010 at 11:14 -
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April 2, 2010 at 11:24 -
Sorry I missed the point and I apologise.
and I agree whole heartedly with your response
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April 2, 2010 at 12:12 -
One of the many pleasures of working as a Personal Advisor in a JobCentre was the opportunity to interview violent people on a regular basis. Unemployment is a very stressful situation, especially for claimants with jobs and so interviews could be like the scene at the start of Blade Runner (“Imagine you are in a desert and you see a turtle on its back…”). Because ministers and senior managers never meet such people it was decided to remove all protection for advisors except a speedy exit from one’s chair. I remember interviewing one gentleman who had a red chequer mark on his board that signing slips, Jobseeker’s Agreements etc were tucked into (although the same information was entered onto the computer system a back up was required to cover the backs of EDS when crashes occurred) and noticed that, gradually, everyone on the floor was looking over to my desk. Subsequently, I was advised that the marking meant the client was PV ie potentially violent and had recently been released from a manslaughter sentence. None of this information was noted on the computer system for “data protection and human rights reasons”. Just as well I eased off on the questioning when the gentleman’s body language stiffened.
Do people working in the private sector (with the exception of sex workers and bouncers) work with dangerous people on a daily basis? -
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April 2, 2010 at 12:31 -
I agree with you Anna on this one……..I appreciate there were many faults in the way the old “institutions” were managed and certainly wouldn’t advocate a return to the savage and outdated ‘treatments’ that were used but I do believe revised ‘institutions’ are necessary not only for the protection of the rest of society but also as sanctuary for those who will never be able to function adequately in the wide world we all inhabit. Care in the community certainly isn’t a’ fits all ’solution.
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April 2, 2010 at 13:21 -
The Community Care Act of 1990 was supposed to signal major changes in the way social care was both administered and delivered in the UK. It came about after years of debate about the best way to achieve a better service. This Act brought about the quarrelsome notions of ‘purchaser’ and ‘provider’ – a means of introducing the ‘market’ into social welfare. I think it failed miserably.
In 2003 and 2008 further Acts brought about the provisions of Inspectorate and Commissions of Health and Audit. The Care Quality Commission was also introduced. But the notion of community care had well and truely disappeared by then. It was back to make do and mend, especially for social work and community teams. The resources for users of services were already being stacked in favour of child care to the detriment of eveything else. Mental health still only receives about 2% of the total Care budget.
For years there had been major and persistent change in the administration of the Care sector. Sadly, the investment was lagging some way behind. This in effect has meant that there may exist, in theory, a useful process for the care of people in this country. But it does not in any shape or form match the needs of people who are recipients of the services provided (not offered) or those that work within the system. There is some valuable work being done but it is despite the systems in place rather than because of them.
The governments of the last thirty years deserve thirty years hard labour for what they have done in the name of social care and community in the UK.
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April 2, 2010 at 13:34 -
“The nub of the matter, he calmly tells you, is that he murdered his father, and his mother, who was present, died of shock.
It had meant a bit of a hiccup in probate of the estate.“
I don’t know if I ever told you before, but you have quite a way with words…
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April 2, 2010 at 15:07 -
Pavlov’s Cat. 11:24
I claim my £5. You are not, & never will be, a politician.
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April 3, 2010 at 11:34 -
The problem with the “Old system” was that all the clever (?) accountants saw it as an easy way to save “headline” money very quickly by just doing away with it
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April 3, 2010 at 14:10 -
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April 4, 2010 at 04:16 -
Elephant never forgets
What the accountants saw was money, but not the saving of it. What they saw was the money they could make selling off the asylum estates.
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