http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-22/who-is-christopher-27badness27-binse3f/402...Convicted prison escapee Christopher 'Badness' Binse, 43, is the gunman currently holed up in a north Melbourne home.
Read more about the man who has spent about half his life in prison and more recently, has managed to keep police officers at bay during a lengthy siege that is still unfolding.
Binse is a repeat bank robber and jail escapee, who since the age of 13, has spent most of his life behind bars.
In 2005, he told ABC Radio National he was made a ward of the state as a child.
I'd run away and break into cars and steal cars just to sleep, and stuff like that, and that caused me to come into contact with the police, be arrested, and sent to juvenile detention centre.
It wasn't a place I should have been really at the end of the day.
I should have been somewhere else, I should have been sent to a psychiatrist or whatever, or psychologist, to see what was the cause of me running away, it was as simple as that.
If they had have addressed the issue then, then I wouldn't have chosen this path. That didn't help me at all, if anything it just spiralled things further. I just started to learn more about crime, how to break into other cars, it was education in further crime.
After spending time behind bars at Pentridge at the age of 17, he started to commit more serious offences.
He was given the nickname 'Badness' by a friend in Pentridge prison in 1988. "There was good, there was bad, there was badder. Then there was badness," Binse said in the 2005 interview.
He committed a number of armed bank robberies and represented himself at trials, even cross-examining some of the victims. He said it wasn't until he spoke to the victims that he felt "the acute affects of what they endured".
He made a number of attempted escapes from prison, including from Parramatta Prison in 1992.
I cut the bars on the top landing of A5 wing in Parramatta, lowered myself onto a roof, and from there I jumped onto the new reception roof.
I was shot at by one of the officers who witnessed me, I attempted to abseil down into a security zone, the bedding sheets I had put together, they broke, and then I had to scale the perimeter fence and ran out the front gate.
Whilst on the run, Binse says he sent police postcards and put ads in newspapers.
I'd actually send the postcard from say Sydney on the day before I flew in, arrive in Victoria, commit an armed robbery that afternoon.
I'd time it where they'd probably received the postcard, so I'd be in their mind, and they would have had me as a suspect for the crime, you know, I was just playing with them.
At Binse's last court appearance in 1996, he was shackled in leg irons and handcuffs while guards carried shotguns.
After his second escape, Binse went back to prison. He served out his sentence in Victoria before being transferred to New South Wales, where he spent a further eight-and-a-half years in jail. He had the dubious honour of being one of the first inmates in the new $20 million maximum security unit at Goulburn Jail, known as Super Max.
Binse was repeatedly denied parole. The last time parole was denied, frustrated and angry, he stopped cooperating with authorities, demanded solitary confinement, and started studying Buddhism.
In 2005, after serving his full sentence, he was released from Super Max. Upon his release, he called for improved rehabilitation program in jail.
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