Recording: Jailing is failing

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello, everyone.  Sorry there was a little bit of a delay there.  We've just got some connectivity issues with one of our guests.  Thanks, everyone, for joining us today.  I'll just wait for maybe 20 seconds for more people to enter the virtual room and then we'll kick it off. There's over 200 people in the virtual room, so I will kick it off now. 

 

So hello, everyone.  Thank you for joining us for today's event.  I want to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are all on the traditional lands of First Nations people and these were lands that were never ceded.  I'm in Glebe in Sydney, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.  It also happens to be the land on which UTS, as a campus, stands.  So I want to pay particular respect to the First Nations owners of the land that I'm on.  I pay respect to Elders past and present and acknowledge them particularly as traditional custodians of knowledge for the land on which our university is built, the Gadigal people. 

 

My name is Verity Firth.  I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS and I also lead our Centre For Social Justice and Inclusion.  It is my huge pleasure to be joined today by Keenan Mundine, Debbie Kilroy and Mindy Sotiri.  I'm going to be introducing them all properly in a minute.  First we do have a couple of housekeeping issues. Today's event is being live captioned, so if you want to view the captions, you click on the CC, closed caption, panel ‑ button at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  We're also posting a separate link in the chat now which will open captions in a separate window if you would prefer to have your closed captions that way.

 

You can also ask questions during this event, so if you want to ask a question, you'll see there is a Q&A box, which is also in your Zoom control panel, and you can type it in there.  The good thing about using the Q&A box is it means you can also upvote other people's questions.  So if there is a question you particularly wanted to be asked, vote for it.  I do tend to ask the most popular questions because they rise up to the top but I also look around and ask interesting questions as well.  Please, as much as possible, make sure your questions are short and relevant to the topic that we're discussing.

 

So we're hosting today's discussion in partnership with the Justice Reform Initiative, who are committed to breaking cycles of disadvantage in the criminal justice system.  They are one of many organisations working to change the system and stop the worrying rates of imprisonment for First Nations women, people with mental health issues, people with disability and others because jailing is failing. Change The Record, Australia's national Aboriginal‑led coalition of legal, health and family violence prevention experts, shows that there's been an 88% increase in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being incarcerated in the last decade and these people are 13% more likely than non‑Indigenous people to be imprisoned. First Nations women, representing 2% of the population, make up 34% of Australia's prison population.  First Nations men are twice as likely to be in prison as in university.  This is a national crisis. 

 

The failures continue.  Women are the fastest growing cohort of our prisons, mostly for non‑violent offences, and many themselves victims of domestic abuse.  Australia is failing children, holding kids as young as 10 criminally responsible, well below the recommended age.  It is failing people with mental illness or disability and it is failing Australian taxpayers, costing over $110,000 per prisoner each year. 

 

The issues of the system are plain to see but crucial reform is not happening or, if it is happening, it is happening far too slowly.  So do what do we need to do to make change happen? I'm honoured today to bring into our conversation three distinguished panellists. The first is Keenan Mundine.  Now, it's Keenan that we're having trouble ‑ oh, he's just appearing in the box.  So I think we do have Keenan Mundine, thank goodness.  But Keenan Mundine is a proud First Nations man with connections to the Biripi Nation of New South Wales, through his mother, who is from Taree, and to the Wakka Wakka Nation in Queensland through father, who is from Cherbourg.  He was born and raised on Gadigal land in Redfern.  Keenan is one of the founders of Deadly Connections, an Aboriginal community‑led not‑for‑profit organisation that breaks the cycles of disadvantage      and trauma, to directly address the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the child protection and justice systems. Keenan's journey has taken him to the United Nations in Switzerland to address the Human Rights Council and share his story in the hope that they will lean on Australia's government to raise the age of criminal responsibility.  Keenan and his wife, Carly, are committed to changing the narrative for their mob and communities.  So welcome, Keenan.  Thanks so much for joining us.

 

Debbie Kilroy is one of Australia's leading advocates for protecting the human rights of women and children through decarceration, the process of moving away from using prisons and other systems of social control in response to crime and social issues.  Debbie's passion for justice is the result of her personal experience of the criminal justice system and an unwavering belief that prison represents a failure of justice.  In 2003, Debbie was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to the community for working with women in prison.  She has also been awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal and a Churchill Fellowship to explore decarceration strategies and programs internationally.  Debbie was admitted to the legal profession by the Supreme Court of Queensland in 2007 and now has her own law firm and, in addition to being the CEO of Sisters Inside, is one of Queensland's leading criminal solicitors and a member of the Queensland Government Sentencing Advisory Council.  Welcome, Debbie.  It's wonderful to have you here today. 

 

Mindy Sotiri is the Executive Director of the Justice Reform Initiative, a new national advocacy body working to reform the criminal justice system and end overincarceration across Australia.  Mindy has spent more than 25 years working in the criminal justice system as a community sector practitioner, advocate, social worker, researcher, academic and activist.  Mindy is also a member of the Keeping Women Out Of Prison Coalition, the After Prison Network and multiple other community‑based advocacy coalitions working to build pathways out of the justice system. Prior to her work at the Justice Reform Initiative, Mindy oversaw advocacy, policy and research at the Community Restorative Centre, a service supporting people leaving prisons and their families.  So welcome to you too, Mindy.  Thank you very much for joining us and also thank you for partnering with the Centre for this important discussion.

 

Alright, so I'm going to begin with you, Keenan.  It's good to see you.  Your wife ‑ you and your wife, Carly, built Deadly Connections to be grounded in culture, empowering First Nations communities.  Deadly Connections' programs encourage and strengthen connection to cultural identity, Country, language, communities and families.  Can you talk to us a bit about why this is so important?

 

KEENAN MUNDINE:  Thank you.  Can you hear me? Thanks, everyone. I think for me ‑ and understanding I guess a little bit about my back story and my journey is what sort of motivates us and directs us in terms of the service which we want to build and deliver.  My internet connection was pretty shoddy so I didn't get the introduction but I'll give a little bit of a recap.  I grew up on The Block and my Mum and Dad didn't work when I was a young kid and there was a lot of drugs and violence and crime in my community, which I was exposed to as a child.  There was a lot of domestic violence in my household.  There was a lot of physical violence against me as a child.  And in my young experience, in my young life, I lost my Mum, and not long after losing my Mum, my father was found hanging in a car park across the road from my primary school.  My community and my family didn't know how to give me and my siblings the support that I needed.  I was the youngest of three boys at that time and the ultimate decision to keep us out of state care and not making us a child of the state, our family separated us and they all took a child each.  I don't think they understood how much it's going to impact me growing into a young man and trying to find myself and where I fitted in the community, and not having that guidance and support at such a young age, when I started developing in primary school and moving on into high school and asking questions about: why? Why did I have to have this life? Why did I have to experience all these things? Why did I have to lose my Mum? Why did I have to be taken away from my brothers and be placed in a household with a family where I'd have to watch their siblings interact but I didn't get to interact with mine? It was really, really psychologically damaging and really traumatising for me. 

 

At the age of 14, just after the Olympics, I was going into year 8 and I was really yearning for my family and my parents and my life and my home and my safety, where nobody was thinking about that.  They were thinking that all I needed was some food and a blanket and some education and I'd be a bright young man. That ultimately led to my decision of leaving that placement where I was at with a family member at that time and seeking out my brothers on my own terms because nobody fostered that relationship.  Nothing prepared me for when I found my older sibling and how much his trauma manifested and how it was being played out.  He was already heavily involved in the criminal justice system.  He was already experimenting with drugs and alcohol.  He was already heavily involved in crime and drugs and he couldn't be that big brother.  That naive young boy thought, "If I just get to my brother, everything is gonna be alright".  He left and went about his journey and in the space of about three months, my world got flipped upside down again.  After losing both my parents and being separated from my community, I left the house I was in, I lost my brother again, I was homeless effectively, I had no form of income, no way of putting clothes and food on my back, and I was introduced to the life of crime and what comes with that.  By 15 I had a fully blown heroin habit.  At 14 I entered the criminal justice system.  It was in and out of the criminal justice system up until 18.  My juvenile treatment was pretty horrendous.  I've got some documents and files in the back room that I got rid of recently, and on more than one occasion, I shared exactly what I shared with you today, and through all of my juvenile detention, I was not treated, I was not diagnosed, I was not supported, I was not connected with ways of understanding my trauma and my experience, and connecting me back to my culture and keeping me safe. 

 

Unfortunately, I turned 18 in juvenile detention and because of the lack of support and pathways for me, I progressed into adult prison and my first taste of adult imprisonment, which was at 18, was breaching a community‑based order and being accused of break‑and‑enters and armed robberies, I ended up spending three years on remand just fighting my legal battles.  I ended up doing four years, and for me, once again, as I was growing and developing, I had a lot of questions and no answers and I wanted a different life other than the one that I was experiencing, one that was different from the reality that I was living in.  I was only showed messages of what a life could be like from a TV in my cell while watching sitcoms, white sitcoms like, "Oh, that's the family I want.  I want food in the fridge all the time.  I want electricity on all the time.  I want hot water going.  I want nice, clean sheets and nice, clean clothes for myself."  But, unfortunately, the criminal justice system didn't know how to put me in the right place with the right people to fulfil my basic needs so I didn't have to resort to crime and take drugs to escape from my experience.

 

It was then as an adult that I met my wife and I was still heavily involved in the criminal justice system.  I went back to prison.  She supported me through that and supported me in finding my own voice and coming out of prison in 2014 at 24 years old.  I never had a tax file number.  I never had a bank account.  I never had a drivers' licence.  I never had my own tenancy  or a lease.  I never had my own accommodation.  I never had a job.  I never had a resume.  She was very instrumental in helping me navigate all these barriers that kept me entrenched in the criminal justice system.  She got me connected back into sports, community, my family, and allowing me to explore my own identity and my own culture, and that's reconnecting with my father's siblings and my father's family who are still up in Queensland and exploring that side of my bloodline that I got disconnected from, exploring my Mum and my Nan and their struggles and what they had to overcome to be able to come to Redfern and meet my Dad and make me. 

 

So for me, embedding culture and connection and community in the service that we deliver ‑ we know the research when working with First Nations people, that culture is a protective factor, especially working with young people and people who have experienced trauma in their life and addiction, that connecting them with their mob, their bloodlines, their storylines, their songs, is a way of building and repairing all of these things that they have experienced in their life and letting them know that they're here for a purpose and, no matter what they're carrying, it is not a burden.  That's all from my own lived experience and that pathway for me in the criminal justice system was what made me proud of who I am, no matter the decisions and the choices I made from the circumstances that I was in, that my people came before me.  They struggled.  They battled their struggles.  Some succumbed to them.  Some are still battling them.  But what we do have is deep‑rooted culture, story and connection to this land, and that's something that I am very proud of and that's what made me heal from my traumatic experiences as a child and entering the criminal justice system as a young person.  I guess the biggest privilege that I have now is knowing how vulnerable I was in those times and how abandoned I felt and having the privilege now to walk alongside people who are in similar places when I was vulnerable is the biggest privilege for me because I know what it feels like when you're backed into a corner.  You feel like nobody loves you, you have nowhere to go, you don't belong anywhere, and you don't feel like nobody trusts you.  I've been there and for me that's why Deadly Connections and the service that we provide is amazing, but being that medium to be able help people in their healing journey understand how things impact them, how we take care of ourselves and how we can give that back to the next generation and also, at the same time, inspire people that feel trapped and blocked, that there's hope, there's hope for a better quality of life than the one that I have experienced, whether it be poverty, whether it be domestic violence, whether it be sexual violence, whether it be child removal, whether it be addiction, suicide.  There's hope at the end of the light that if I truly take care of myself and take care of me and be connected and grounded in things that make me happy and build my identity, I can have a life where I don't have to take drugs, where I don't have to commit crime to get some food and put some clothes on my back, and I can sit with myself and say: you know what, I didn't have any control over those circumstances but I have control over the way it makes me feel.  So I hope that answers your question and I didn't take up too much time. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Keenan, that just answers it unbelievably well.  Thank you so much for that.  It absolutely captures why the work you do is so important.  Thank you. 

 

KEENAN MUNDINE:  Thank you for the question. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  My next question is to Debbie Kilroy. Debbie, you're a leading advocate and expert on decarceration.  Can you tell us a bit more about what that means and some decarceration strategies?

 

DEBBIE KILROY:  Sure.  Thank you.  And before I speak today, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that I reside on here at Meanjin, the Turrbal/Jagera people.  I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present.  Sovereignty has never been ceded and, as a coloniser, I feel quite overwhelmed that I can reside on this stolen land. 

 

I'm an abolitionist, which means that I'm working to achieve several things.  Primarily, I'm working alongside my community to dismantle the entire prison industrial complex due to the inherit racism, classism and transcendent harm of our criminal punishment system.  Prisons are obsolete institutions and they exacerbate societal harms instead of fixing them.  In fact, imprisonment reproduces the very conditions that lead people to prison in the first instance.  So I am not interested in doing any work to humanise the cages.  Rather, I am working to tear down the cages and build a more equitable society in which we don't need to rely on cages at all for anybody, for any human.  I'm therefore interested in deep structural strategies so that we can handle and even think about crime in this country called Australia and, of course, around the world.

 

So my work with my community extends beyond decarceration.  Decarceration involves finding ways to get people out of prison and keeping them out of prison in the first instance.  I want to unlock shackles and swing open prison doors and get people out.  I want to free her.  I want to free them all.  This is also really important during this pandemic of COVID‑19.  But the work of an abolitionist isn't just about tearing down prison walls and turning those walls into bridges, as my sister Angela Davis would say.  Our aim is to reshape our society as a whole.  And as my other sister Ruthie Wilson Gilmore from the US, when asked the question, "What is it that we have to change?" and her response, as my response is, "Everything, everything."  We are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, racism and mental health crises and we continue to criminalise people on the basis of race, class, sexuality, ability, health and illness.  So, as abolitionists, we are creating a vision which is far more than a structure; a future in which essential needs like housing, education, health care, for example, are met, allowing people to live safe and fulfilled lives without the need for prisons at all.  And we must name colonisation as a problem. 

 

We know it is colonisation that sees Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people criminalised.  We know that. But we don't talk about race and colonisation.  Therefore, as an abolitionist, we are doing more than just working on decarceration.  We are calling for moratoriums on prisons, like the work being done to stop the expansion of prisons in Victoria, the women's prisons.  Build houses, not prisons.  And we are talking about excarceration.  This is perhaps the most transformative part of our work.  This involves finding ways to divert people away from the prison industrial complex in the first place.  And we want to be decriminalising mental health episodes, fight homelessness, decriminalise drug use and to keep people from getting pipelined into the prison industrial complex.  And we don't just stop at decriminalisation.  We want to build a safer and more inclusive society and community.  We want to fund mental health treatment, provide housing for those in need and offer adequate rehabilitation services for people with substance dependence and we want to shift the way we think about crime and what we define as crime.  Basically, we want to offer people affordable and healthy means to live and survive, with the end goal of building community, so that we can deal with the tensions in our own way and don't need to rely on armed police and armed prison officers and cages to lock us in.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Debbie.  That's a really powerful statement.  Thank you for saying that. Mindy, the Justice Reform Initiative, which of course is the partner for today's webinar, is looking to build a bipartisan movement around the idea that jailing is failing. You've just seen two pretty passionate arguments in favour of that proposition. Do you think that enough people believe that, or is more needed to be done to convince people that the system isn't working?

 

DR MINDY SOTIRI:  Yes.  It's a great question, and I just also want to start by acknowledging that I'm on Gadigal land and also pay my respects to Elders past and present and also acknowledge that this land was never ceded.  I also just want to thank Debbie and Keenan for those unbelievably powerful opening statements about the failure of this system and that incredibly incisive analysis of all that is wrong about it. 

 

So the Justice Reform Initiative is absolutely focused on bringing together people in a bipartisan way, in a cross‑party way, to really understand that prison is not working, that jailing is failing.  There is nowhere near enough people at the moment that care about this issue.  I'll just be really blunt about that.  I think that one of the big challenges for reform for decarceration, for this movement, is to actually bring along more people, to get more people on board to care about this issue, and I think that's really doable, but I think we need to be quite thoughtful about how we go about this. 

 

We were lucky enough to do a little bit of market research earlier this year where ‑ and obviously market research isn't perfect ‑ but what we wanted was to try to figure out what the best ways might be to start really engaging with people around where they were at with their thinking in terms of the justice system and to test some potential messaging for trying to bring more people on board and, of course, bringing people on board is part of a strategy of trying to bring parliamentarians on board.  And we did close to 2,500 surveys with a representative panel across all jurisdictions in Australia.  We wanted to know where people were at.  Just as a starting point, I guess the first thing to note is that when we were testing for context and level of concern on a range of different social issues, things that might shift people's voting intent, the criminal justice system and I guess most specifically the need to reduce the numbers of people in prison is right down the bottom of people's lists of concerns of things that they care about.  So COVID, climate change, hospitals, health care, unemployment, all of these things were very much front of mind for participants.  And when we explored exposure to the justice system, we found that more than a third of people had never had any contact at all.  They had never called the police.  They had never been a victim of crime.  It wasn't in their head.  And people's understanding of what the system is like is really quite low.  This is not me being mean about people.  This is people's own self‑reported level of confidence that they had in terms of their understanding of the system.  So 78% of people said, "Look, we don't know very much about this."  So I think if we do want to bring about change in the space ‑ and, of course, we need to; we absolutely need to ‑ then we do need to grow the number of people in the public who know and care about this issue.  Perhaps unfortunately bringing the community along is absolutely critical in terms of bringing along our political leaders.  So we know that there can be political bravery in leadership and we need to advocate for that as well but we also I guess know that very frequently, the parliamentarians that we want to bring on board need the reassurance that the community is also going to come with them, especially when it comes to issues that touch on community safety and incarceration.  So we need to think carefully about the way that we message to the public and ways that we can actually really build this campaign and build this movement. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I think that's a really insightful analysis, Mindy.  Thank you for sharing that.  Keenan, earlier this year, 30 countries from the United Nations urged Australia's government to raise the criminal age of responsibility to 14, to no avail, which I think is just to our eternal shame.  I can't believe it.  How are you continuing to advocate for reform and do you think reform will happen?

 

KEENAN MUNDINE:  That's a big question.  I think for me, the biggest thing is I'm very, very upset, I guess, at the lack of urgency in terms of the response to the advocacy to raising the age of criminal responsibility.  Like Mindy said, not many people in the wider community understand what happens in these institutions.  I went in at 14 and I was really traumatised by my experience.  At 14, it was the first time I got undressed in front of another male, and a stranger at that.  And I had two of them, so I had one in front of me and one behind me, looking at parts I know they shouldn't have been looking at as grown men.  To go through that experience and then to be locked in a single occupancy cell with no TV, no phone, no form of any distraction of what I just went through and underwent.  That was at 14. 

 

A lot of my associates and friends entered the criminal justice system at 11 and 12. Kids, when they're in these spaces, we know have had early childhood exposure to things that not many children get exposed to and their behaviours get criminalised while they're in there.  I have got some old charges of when I was in there for writing my name on a perspex window in juvenile detention and I got locked in a room for 12 hours with no freedom, no phone call, no psychological support, and that was a punishment because I chose to get a rock and carve my name into a perspex window. 

 

I couldn't have a bad day being in the detention centre as a young kid.  If I woke up and felt resentful about my position and where I was and I swore at a staff member, I would be isolated from the rest of my peers who I'm incarcerated with and I would get taken to a special place within that prison to be isolated and reprimanded for my behaviour.  So it's really psychologically damning and conforming, but for me in terms of continuing the advocacy, it is sharing those voices and those stories of myself and what I witnessed in these institutions.  We have our most vulnerable members of the community and young people who need tenderness, kindness, love.  Unconditional love.  They need to be able to have a place where they can emotionally let go because they're holding on to so much.  They have been through a lot in their young life, and by continuing this narrative and debunking the myth that they're all bad kids and this place rehabilitates them.  Even in juvenile custody, there is no consistent, ongoing psychological treatment or counselling.  In New South Wales, in one centre, they would have a counsellor, then they would have a clinical psychologist, and part of the practices in terms of the clinical psychologist was to diagnose and medicate, not to treat them.  So I seen young kids in the morning at breakfast being so heavily medicated that they'd have to go back to their room and sleep.  Then they'd call that the a.m. shift for pills.  Then at dinner, they'd get medicated again and I seen a lot of my friends go from 45, 50kg, 14‑year‑old boys, within eight months to 100kg, bloated, no exercise, no support, no guidance.  And for me, raising the age of criminal responsibility sits very close with me.  Like I said, our government has failed us in terms of the young people that are in these positions.  The majority of them are from out‑of‑home care and their behaviours are being criminalised, but in terms of keeping the advocacy alive, it is being in a position where I'm supported to explore my vulnerability and the way the state traumatised me.  They have no way of supporting that age bracket of 10 to 14 and giving them the skills to grow and develop into positive young men and members of the community to participate out here.  They are damaging them.  They are psychologically damaging them.  They know the research behind it and what they're doing by exposing children as young as 10 to these institutions is now a lifetime of community services and agencies trying to support these people and trying to undo what a diversionary program could have helped and given them the skills in the community to understand their situation and what's going on and how to regulate their emotions. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's such a moving way to actually describe what is so inherently evil about the fact that we have such a low age of criminal responsibility.  I thought I should share with you, Keenan, in case you are not looking at the Q&A, but far the highest ranked comment is a comment from Marlena Calinina, who has written: "Thank you for sharing, Keenan, and being so vulnerable and brave."  So I just want to say it's really appreciated how you are sharing with us today and it's such a powerful argument that you are making. 

 

Mindy, so Keenan went off ‑ he spoke powerfully the way he has just spoken to us at the United Nations.  It has clearly worked. 30 countries have now urged the Australian Government to raise the criminal age of responsibility.  What impact do you think this has and is the Government more likely to respond to international pressure or really is it not, and is the focus on domestic pressure and what can be applied at our end?

 

DR MINDY SOTIRI:  I think there is the potential for the Government to be responsive to international pressure.  I think we absolutely have to pursue human rights and advocacy issues through international mechanisms, including the UN.  We can't not do that as advocates and as activists.  So it's critical that that work continues.  There is no doubt in terms of things like raising the public profile of this issue and bringing critical human rights issues to public attention that that kind of scrutiny is really critical. It is an important mode of bringing a particular kind of pressure.  But I guess that I don't think that we can assume that that in itself is going to be what it takes to bring about the kind of dramatic decarceration that we actually need to see domestically. 

 

I think we need a mixture of international engagement and local campaign work, and that engagement, that international engagement, might come, say, in the form of pressure from the UN or it might come in the form of inspiration from jurisdictions that are doing things really differently overseas, so cities that have decreased crime rates by fundamentally changing the way they define crime or the way that policing happens or doesn't happen, or it might come from conservative law enforcement leaders in the US leading the charge with some aspects of decarceration.  But I think on the ground in Australia, we still have this piece of work to do where we need to get people concerned enough about this issue to want to talk to their local MP, to engage with their Rotary Clubs, to understand without a doubt that jailing isn't working, that it's failing to keep their community safe.  So I think that there's not just one fix but the UN mechanism is super‑important in terms of raising the profile, but we need to do the domestic work as well. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  So speaking of domestic work, Debbie, you sit on the Queensland Government Sentencing Advisory Council.  How important is it to have people with lived experience in positions like that and how regularly does that happen?

 

DEBBIE KILROY:  That's a good question.  So take a look at this panel.  We are here talking about prison and jail and the criminal punishment system and how it is failing and only 50% of us, myself and Keenan, are on the panel with actual lived prison experience.  Don't get me wrong.  That is a far better statistic than usual.  But it raises the question of who the so‑called experts are in this area. Why are we not listening to them? To us? I would argue that the experts are the people who have been there and experienced imprisonment.  Unless you know this oppression intimately, then you are not the expert.  No matter your degree, your compassion, your proximity to imprisonment, you cannot be the expert if you have not been inside.  So our presence on panels and councils is imperative.  There should be nothing about us without us, but sadly we have had to fight to be on these types of councils and our voices are often marginalised in this space. 

 

My advice to people is that if you look around and you are talking about people who are not sitting at the table, step aside, share your platform and demand that the voices and expertise of those with lived prison experience are around that table, and, most importantly, at the head of that table and having a prime say about matters that affect them, that affect us.  To not do so is to remain complicit in the violence against those who are criminalised by erasing and marginalising us. 

 

Of course, I don't make the assumption in saying that that all of us that have been in prison actually agree with what we all speak about.  There would be robust conversation, and no doubt Keenan is talking about his lived experience.  I have decided not to do that today about my lived experience.  But we both understand our experience ‑ in the sense that he's a man, I'm a woman ‑ but the violence is real.  The violence is palpable.  We can taste the blood in our mouths from the cages that we have been in. 

 

But what we have to do, those of us who have had the lived experience or are living in cages now, is we have to deinstitutionise ourselves.  We are socialised to believe that the criminal punishment system and the prison industrial complex is the only way to deal with any issues.  I see it when we just talk about that.  We're really just trying to rearrange the deckchairs on The Titanic.  That is why I'm an abolitionist.  The system ‑ this panel is called Jailing is Failing.  See, I don't think it is failing.  It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.  When we look at marginalised groups, yes, of course, we know who gets pipelined but that is deliberately because they want to invisiblise us.  They want to invisiblise black people, poor people, mentally ill people, people with drug addictions.  They remove us from the community so we are invisible so then you don't have to worry about us.  So prison is the default response. It keeps us caged so you don't have to worry about us.  Then what we have seen built on that is the welfare industry.  So many people. 

 

So if we look at the situation in this country around houselessness, and then you see how many people are employed in that industry, no wonder it's an issue.  No‑one is building homes; affordable, safe places for people to go to.  People are getting funded to have showers on wheels or washing machines on wheels.  We're not addressing the core issues, which is about getting people into houses, so while we continue to rearrange the deckchairs.  But talking about the lived experience, we as individuals and as a collective group of those of us that have been imprisoned, that have been caged, must support each other to deinstitutionise ourselves because reform is not the answer.  But when we have swallowed that and prison has become part of the subconscious landscape in our minds and that is all we can think of when someone calls crime, then we actually have a problem.  We have got to get rid of the cogs and the screws out of our own being because otherwise our responses are going to be the same, same, same since the colonisation of this country.  Thanks.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I'm going to now move to some questions from the audience because there's some really great audience engagement going on.  I don't know if any one of the panellists has been looking at the Q&As but there are some great questions that have been voted up by many people.  So the question that so far has the highest amount of people wanting it asked is a question from Lucia May.  I might go to you, first, Mindy, on this.  There's also a question from Katherine Bessant which is a bit related and then I'll also open it up for Debbie and Keenan if they want to add some remarks.  Lucia asks: how do we respond to the desire that victims of crime and their families often have to see the perpetrators punished? How does the abolition movement respond to these strong emotions in a way that isn't patronising? Then in a related question, Katherine raises the issue of: what does a response to domestic violence look like without a response from the criminal justice system? So, Mindy, your thoughts first and then I'll come to Keenan and Debbie. 

 

DR MINDY SOTIRI:  I feel like Debbie is absolutely the expert on this, as somebody who has lived and breathed abolitionism for quite some time, but I am happy to give it a crack.  So my thoughts are that, firstly, we need to stop framing victims and offenders as being in opposition.  That is the starting point for these conversations.  The reality is the vast majority of people who are in prison are themselves victims or survivors of crime.  We know with women that the numbers are astounding in terms of the numbers who are survivors of gendered violence. So the starting point has to be this kind of idea of rights being in opposition, we need to start disrupting for a starting point; rights don't exist in opposition.  You mess around with anybody's rights and all of our rights are diminished. So if we are using a rights‑based argument for any of us, if we are talking about race or sex or sexuality, or if we're talking about imprisonment, we have to understand that rights for all of us exist together.  You can't screw with somebody and not expect for all of us to be diminished by that.  That would be my starting point. 

 

The second thing I would say is that fear of crime, fear of being a victim of crime, the experience of being a victim of crime are all things that we need to be really honest about in our conversations.  We cannot pretend that victims ‑ that people that have experienced harm do not sometimes have an impulse to punishment, that we can't pretend that they don't want to see justice done.  So I think we need to be honest about that.  What we know, though, from a lot of research into this space is that often what victims are saying that they want is acknowledgment that a harm has been done, acknowledgment that there has been a breach of the social order, acknowledgment that their experience is able to be heard. 

 

What we know is that the justice system at the moment does not give that to victims of crime, so we've got this adversarial system where often victims of crime come out of it feeling utterly unheard, utterly like what actually happened to them hasn't been heard by the courts, hasn't been heard by the perpetrator, hasn't been heard by the people around them, and that is an incredibly traumatic experience.  So there is the crime itself and then there's the aftermath of the crime, which many victims describe as being incredibly traumatic. 

 

So we absolutely need to think about systems where there are voices, where victims of crime have voices, where those aren't necessarily thought of as being in opposition.  So obviously transformed justice approach, there's restorative justice approaches.  We have lots of different ways of thinking about how we acknowledge breaches of the social order, harm that has been done, while we're honest about it, we hold people to account that we don't necessarily have to put them in prison.  I think, however, we do also need to be really brave and think about ‑ because the conversation always goes ‑ when you're having these conversations ‑ and all of us have had those conversations ‑ it always goes, what about the really bad guys? What about the Martin Bryants? What about this person or what about that person? I think we can hedge that question and we can say, "Look, that's just the tiniest proportion of people in prison".  It really is.  We have less than 1% of people in Australia that are there for crimes where judges have determined their severity to be so bad that they're there for 20 years or more.  The vast majority of people are in for crimes that are not that serious.  But that's the mythology that we have got to actually respond to.  I don't think we can diminish the fact that that is where people are at.  We do need to really start changing the narrative around who it is that goes to prison, what the crimes are that people are committing, and then we do need to have a conversation about the nightmare vision that so many people have.  I don't think that we can shy away from saying what should the response be.  And I'm going to hand over to Debbie to perhaps expand on that because I know that she's done so much thinking in that space. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Debbie, what do you think? 

 

DEBBIE KILROY:  Sure, thanks.  So, of course, this question is a real question.  Those of us that are abolitionists take violence and harm very, very seriously.  We don't shy away from it.  And, of course, we all have a response when violence and harm is perpetrated against us and that we want some type of payback.  You can feel it in your being. 

 

So I'm going to give an example, and that is when I was in prison the last time, my closest friend got stabbed to death sitting beside me and I got stabbed trying to stop that violence.  The prison actually facilitated that violence.  Prison officers knew that the other women had those BBQ forks with the big, long prongs on it with a sharpening block, sharpening it in their cell.  They knew about the plan and they allowed it to happen.

 

So if we're going to talk about violence, let's talk about state violence.  Violence is always couched in regards to one on one.  And the same as domestic violence.  So we cannot make laws to bring us out of violence.  It doesn't work.  When we talk about the so‑called worst of the worst, well, they're doing it anyway.  The system that we have is not stopping it.  So policing and prisons don't actually work.  So just by expanding or reforming the failed system that we have now is actually not going to stop violence.  What we did over the years, of course, when Storm, who was convicted of Debbie's murder ‑ her name was Debbie too ‑ I wanted to kill her because that was the natural response, and those of us that have been in prison, you know the culture of prison and payback is real.  It's only that there was one old screw that worked out in Pentridge that was working in Boggo Road at the time.  When what we called the do‑gooders, those that have never been in prison, the social workers who wanted to come in and facilitate a mediation with Storm and her mates and me and my mates about a murder, they nearly had a mass murder on their hands because when we were going up to the chapel for that nice, calm meeting about a murder inside a prison, of course many of us were armed and it was going to be a bloodbath.  It's this one screw said, "Where the fuck are youse going?".  "We're just going up here for a meeting with them white women. They're gonna mediate.  They're gonna resolve the conflict between us."  He said, "Be fucked they are.  Get!" and sent us on our way. 

 

Anyway, life went on in that sense inside the prison.  Storm and I called a truce.  We shook hands and left our revenge for a later date. But for me, when I was released and because of that murder and going through that trauma with no support from anybody in the free world, only the women who were beside me in there, and we started Sisters Inside ‑ Sisters Inside meant for me it had to be for everybody.  It couldn't be for every woman in prison except for Storm because she killed my friend.  It actually meant that I needed to resolve the issues with Storm myself.  Storm was asked to come up to the chapel.  We used to have our management meetings inside the chapel. She was very, "What's going on?".  But over months, without the prison knowing about it, we actually worked through that and resolved the trauma between us and come out the other side ‑ what is now couched as transformative justice. 

 

But those of us who have been in prison, we deal with the conflict in there, whatever type of conflict it is.  We have the skills.  But no‑one asks us because we're just prisoners without any so‑called "academic" degrees, what would we know? But we are actually surviving in a very violent, violent institution.  And we talk about the Martin Bryants and being the worst killer in this country.  Well, can I tell you, the worst killers in this country were the invaders that slaughtered Aboriginal people, slaughtered many more Aboriginal people than Martin Bryant did with a gun.  So let's actually be fair dinkum about the state violence and the violence that's picked and chosen by the state and the do‑gooders about what needs to be addressed and what's a crime.  Let's deal with the real crimes of this country: the invasion and stolen land of the First Peoples of this country.  That's where we start. 

 

When we talk about lived experience, I am not just talking about in the context of prison.  I'm also talking about First Nations people to hand back the land in the first instance as a step towards resolving the massive, deep, ingrained conflict that we have in this country, the lies that this country is built on, and we know that the more laws we enact, the more marginalised and predominantly when we talk about domestic violence ‑ we have seen it happen with DV laws ‑ because the laws are degendered, the way that the violence of policing target Aboriginal women, that's whose pipelined into prison for breaching domestic violence orders and we have seen it with strangulation laws and we are now going to see it with those that are advocating and the cheer squad of feminists for the criminalisation of coercive control. 

 

Legislating to end violence does not work because it's a violent institution that you're asking to bring you safety.  We actually need to build systems of safety and security outside the institutions that are the violent problem.  We cannot rearrange the deckchairs of the violence of policing and the violence of prisons.  We know the answers and they must come from communities, and every community will have a different resolution than others, and that's OK.  We don't need the state to dictate, just as we, women who have been in prison that lived through Debbie's murder, are now sisters, where Storm is my friend.  I advocated for her to get out of prison for parole, and we have moved on.  We can never change that Debbie is dead and both of us, all of us, will carry that grief, but the reality is I am a human and I don't want to harm any other human, whether they have harmed me, because that actually just continues on the treadmill of violence. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Keenan, do you have anything you want to add on this?

 

KEENAN MUNDINE:  I'll have a go. I think for me, Deb touched on it.  It's around reformative justice and understanding the different levels and aspects involved in justice, in seeking justice and what an individual wants in justice.  For me the big learning lesson around restorative justice is somebody steals your bike, you go to the police and you are put in a cell.  Restorative justice would go get your bike and give it back to you, but he would still see the cell.  But reformative justice is sitting him, asking him, "Why did you take my bike? How can we stop you from taking somebody's else's bike.  This is what happened when you took my bike and this is how it made me feel.  Now do you want to continue stealing bikes, knowing that this is the outcome?".  That for me in terms of working with victims is: what justice are you seeking and would you be happy in understanding why this person made that decision and how do we stop this person now from making a decision like this again and impacting somebody else in the future. 

 

So that's for me, in terms of the space around victims, prison, jail, crime and punishment, is where I try to educate people and also let them know that, like Deb said, prison is not really failing us.  It is a billion dollar industry.  It has got the most ‑ they get cherry‑picked out of university, academics, to be able to lead these new initiatives on behalf of the government.  The smartest people who have really, really high intelligence and research protocols that drive this mechanism of state‑sanctioned violence and national violence on the part of the government. 

 

I also have the privilege of being in university classes with a partnership with UNSW and teaching Indigenous perspective on the criminal justice system and learning about the social contract.  It comes down to criminology 101 where we now hand over that state‑sanctioned violence to the state to seek justice on my behalf and I am more than happy to lock myself away in my little room and in my life and I don't really care what happens to that person.  If they go to jail, if they get stabbed and killed, if they get raped in there, if they get tortured in there, I don't care because they stole my bike; so go deal with it, the state.  This is where the jail ‑ and the criminal justice system ‑ is failing us on the part of our community because nobody comes out better.  And when they do come out, what sort of opportunity do you want these people to have? If you don't give them a job or you don't help them get a job, they will come and break into your house as a job.  So that's where I sort of sit in this space.  I hope that gives you a bit of insight into where I am at. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's a great answer.  I am really mindful of the time.  There are only three minutes left, so what I thought I might do is slightly alter a question from Lindsay McCabe.  Lindsay McCabe has said: "Always a privilege to hear you both speak, Keenan and Debbie.  Thank you."  Lindsay's question is specifically to Debbie around how people can get involved in moving towards decarceration and abolition.  So I'll get you to answer that, Debbie, in a second.  But then I might just get Mindy and Keenan to then add to that in terms of how can people get involved more broadly in what we're talking about today, whether it's the justice ‑ the initiative that we're partnering with today or whether it's through your work, Keenan.  So start with you, Debbie, around moving towards decarceration and abolition and then to you, Mindy and Keenan, and you can take us out on how we can get more people involved.  There's been over 500 people on this webinar the whole time so I am sure there are a lot of people keen to lend a hand.  First to you, Debbie. 

 

DEBBIE KILROY:  Sure.  There's so much to be said.  One hour just can't cut it! Look, there's many of us that have been in the abolition of the prison industrial complex movement for a very long time, for decades, and there is a lot of us that are involved around the world.  So you can actually just get online and find us and have conversations.  There's been an uprising of the younger generation, that those of us that are older are more than happy for you to stand on our shoulders, and just as we have stood on those women's shoulders before us, because this is going to be a fight that needs to be taken on long after I'm dead and buried. 

 

So the women that have supported me throughout my life and who are my sisters are the likes of Angela Davis, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Marion Carber who has just released a fantastic book, Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar have just released a number of publications.  You can follow them.  Angela is not on social media.  And Ruthie isn't as such on Twitter.  They sort of don't like that, which I totally understand.  But the others are.  And there's many of us that are on.  I think of the activists here in this country:  Chelsea Bond, Amy Maguire, Nayuka Gorrie, Alison Whitaker, Latoya, Rule.  There's so many ‑ black women.  There's many more, and I'm sorry if I haven't named you but you know who you are.  So you can follow us on social media, Twitter.  You can learn where other events like this are on.  We also put up things like great readings, great articles.  We write.  We send submissions together, like the Institute of Collaborative Race Research with Chelsea and her mob there, and Sisters Inside, they've submitted a number of papers to the task force here in Queensland on women's safety, advocating to not criminalise coercive control.  So you can read them.  They're on both of our websites.  And have conversations.  Young people are taking the lead and are understanding this and thinking more broadly about abolition feminism and not just about the narrow‑mindedness of castle feminism.  And that's where we have to go and black women are leading the way. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Debbie.  That's great.  Mindy, how can people get involved with the Justice Reform Initiative?

 

DR MINDY SOTIRI:  Go on to the website and sign up to the Jailing is Failing, become a supporter and then you will get updates around the campaign work that we're engaged in.  But also, I'll just say this really quickly, that what Debbie is saying and also what Keenan has touched on, the work is really in the community, in building the community and in having a well‑resourced ‑ so the disadvantage that funnels people into the prison system is what we need to be focused on in terms of a lot of our reform efforts, and that means also supporting organisations like Sisters Inside, supporting organisations like Deadly Connections, that are doing incredible stuff for people.  So there's obviously donations to organisations that we know are actually doing a really critical job in terms of reducing incarceration. 

 

But I would also say we all need to be participating in shifting the narrative around what prison is, however we frame it, in terms of it's failing or doing its job, we know we don't want to be it to be continuing in this way.  So we need to be having those kinds of conversations.  And I guess really trying to think creatively about the things that you can do in your community in terms of connecting with local members, with Rotary Clubs. Obviously, the Justice Reform Initiative is looking to try to coordinate a lot of that movement, so please get in contact.  We're very new.  It's just me at the moment.  But we're growing and we would love as many people from abolitionists to people that are just starting to think about this stuff on board because we want to broadchurch to make this change. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Wonderful.  Keenan, you get the last word today.  How can people get involved and support you in the work you do? Oh, Debbie ...

 

DEBBIE KILROY:  Sorry, I was going to say one thing and then Keenan can have the last word.  Is that OK, Keenan? Being asked something on the spot, you always forget something and I forgot the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls that we as women who have been in prison have established.  And the international campaign of Free Her.  And a big shout out to my sisters Tabitha Lean, who you must follow on social media.  Tabitha is just a brilliant black woman, and Vicky Roach.  Two amazing Aboriginal women who have been in prison who are my sisters.  But the National Network and the Free Her campaign is an international network where we have women as well from every country you can imagine around the world and all of us on that are women with lived experience.  So yes. Over to you, Keenan. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Wonderful. Now you can have the last word, Keenan.  How can we help you?

 

KEENAN MUNDINE:  I am the same, so don't apologise, Deb.  I hate thinking on the run and trying to get this question right.  But just to second what Mindy and Deb said.  Jump on to Deadly Connections website.  See some of the amazing work that we do, the programs that we do.  The hardest thing working in a not‑for‑profit space is we're very under‑resourced.  I really hate it, about asking for money, but donations is I guess probably 30% at the moment of the capital that we have.  So donations are very important in terms of the work that Deadly Connections does in trying to make sure that it's sustainable.  If not donations, people power.  Come, volunteer, get your work on board, some corporate sponsorships, jump on our socials, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, stay up‑to‑date with the work Deadly Connections is doing.  We repost and share other people in this space, their work, but staying connected in terms of fighting against this system.  The biggest thing that I see in this space and the way the US fights in terms of the criminal justice space is they're very well organised.  So for us to see the change that we need, we need to be organised.  We need to be allies and accomplices and standing in each other's corner and backing each other and challenging ignorant beliefs and views and ignorant information that's out there around this.  So getting yourself equipped with the research, the stats and the stories within those stats, so when you're in these spaces and somebody says something ignorant, you can challenge them not only from your fire and rage in your belly, but you can give them examples of why you are so enraged and upset.  "Where are you receiving your messages from?".  Sit down and talk with people with lived experience.  Advocate for raising the age.  Advocate for everybody being released from prison and having access to equality and freedom, access to a job with a criminal record, access and pathways to accommodation and housing, to mental health support when coming out of prison, access to all of these things that are denied to us because we have been criminalised. 

 

So I hope that answers everybody's question.  But that for me is a way people can get involved and stayed involved.  For me, and I am pretty sure for Deb, this is not a job for us because of our experience.  I know the way I started Deadly Connections and the way Deb started Sisters Inside is with zero capital and with a passion and a desire for change and making sure that our people that feel left behind and invisible are heard and stay connected and have a space not just in prison but when they come out of prison, they have a space out here and they're accepted.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, Keenan.  That was a wonderful way to go out.  Thank you again to everyone who joined us today.  It was a fantastic webinar.  Honestly, our three panellists, you were just magnificent.  It has definitely fired me up.  I'm going to go and log on to all those websites now and I encourage everyone in the audience to do that as well.  Remember, if you have registered, you will also get a link so you can share this webinar with all your social connections and start a movement, as we have all been saying today.  So thanks, everybody.  Thanks again and I'll see you at the next one and thanks again to our panellists.