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. 

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.

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.