About a decade ago, I visited a halfway house for people recovering from drug addiction and was given the opportunity to talk to a few of the residents. I remember thinking how surprisingly ordinary their stories were.

I feel many of us were raised with the idea that people who took a drug-filled turning in their life journey did so in this deliberate and almost studied way, but, as I sat there, I realised how any one of the men I spoke to could have been my brother, my cousin, my uncle. It was a sobering experience full of a deeper understanding of how fragile we all are.

I still remember asking one man how he had gotten there and the analogy he gave me: he told me that all his life he had never been able to have a single scoop of ice cream, he always needed to finish the entire tub in one sitting.

I left there knowing that the way that I would think of addiction from then on had forever changed. There was no real distinction between the people who took drugs and those who didn’t; it really could happen to anyone.

I was reminded of my experience last week as I read the disgusting comments under articles about a 29-year-old woman’s tragic death. Reading through the interview her father gave about the alleged mental cruelty she suffered in prison was heartbreaking enough, but to then see the vileness of the comments under it, I was lost for words.

This woman in the throes of addiction was not only not given the right opportunities to get better and start afresh, but on top of what her family had already been through, they had to further be subjected to smug keyboard warriors letting us know that they have raised their children better.

We keep hearing story after story about what is happening behind the high walls of our prison and instead of perhaps assessing the situation and seeing how things can be improved, we have people gathering the first stones to cast at victims and their families. So keen are we to judge, to objectify, to give our cruel opinions that we forget that the people behind the stories are real people.

I am desperately enraged at a system that allows state-employed bullies to flourish with no condemnation- Anna Marie Galea

People who perhaps were going through difficult times and didn’t feel that they had better ways to process them, people who fell in with the wrong crowds, people who perhaps weren’t given the same opportunities in life as others.

The list of reasons why someone goes down one path and not another goes on and on, and none of us is walking in the same shoes. What should never be permissible is for torture to take the place of what could have been reform.

I have read Kim’s father’s interview more than once; I have thought about how desperate she must have been to want to leave her life so badly only three weeks before she was meant to be released. I have seen her photo splashed all over social media. And all I have thought throughout everything is what a dreadful waste this is and how badly our system has failed.

I am angry. Angry at those who wave this away with a judgemental shrug, infuriated at those who condemn without care. But most of all, I am desperately enraged at a system that allows state-employed bullies to flourish with no condemnation.

To those who keep allowing senseless deaths like this to occur, I say this: you can wash your hands all you want, I can still see the blood on them.