A decolonising approach can end systemic injustice
On a rainy afternoon, I set out to meet the team that started Deadly Connections, a community and justice services not-for-profit, working on and around Gadigal land. Partners in life and business, Carly Stanley and Keenan Mundine are a force to be reckoned with. They started Deadly Connections to disrupt cycles of disadvantage within First Nations’ communities.
Carly and Keenan complement each other in every way – from their personal and professional experiences to the way they finish each other’s sentences and step in when the other needs them to. They generously agree to share their time with kindling & sage, to tell us about the organisation they founded 3 years ago, and what it means to take a decolonising approach to business.
Keenan Mundine & Carly Stanley. Source: supplied
kindling & sage: Can you tell a bit about the origins of Deadly Connections? What made you want to start this organization?
Carly: Our combined professional and lived experiences told us there were no services that could support us in the way that we needed, that understood our cultural values and needs. [Professionally], we were always the token Aboriginal staff member. [Organisations] want Aboriginal people, but they don't want to take on what we've got to say. [Even though] I'm connected to the community, I'm connected to the issues, I know what needs to happen to help our mob, to help them overcome issues.
Carly tells me that in previous roles, she never felt seen or heard and couldn’t understand why that was.
We both left school early, we didn’t complete high school. I went on to go back to Uni because I thought: they're not taking me seriously because I don’t have a university degree, so I'm going to get a university degree and that will change things. Nothing changed. Then I went on and got a Master’s degree. Nothing changed. [I realised] it's just me. It's not what I'm doing or what I'm not doing.
We were at a crossroads. I was on maternity leave and then [Keenan] was let go from a role because they discovered he was on a supervised order and had just come out of custody. We were both at this point of “what do we do now? Where do we want to go?” The community had so many concerns around young people and justice involvement over-representation, substance abuse. We started, as community members, to deliver a program in inner city suburbs. A street-based youth program where we would provide sporting activities and food for the kids.
Keenan: Make sure they’re fed and feel safe.
Carly: Make sure the police aren't harassing them. It was really successful, and we thought, how do we build on this? How can we do more of this? That's how Deadly Connections came up.
Keenan: From my lived experience, as an Aboriginal person involved in the justice system and battling with my own drug use and abuse, there was no Aboriginal service I could go to if I had to have my needs met. I would have to go to multiple agencies to get all of my different needs met. We wanted to be able to support people in one place for all of their needs rather than sending them across the CBD to see child protection over here, see justice over there, over here to see the Medical Center… For people that are marginalised, you don't have the money to get around [all those places] and then if you get around the way in which you know how to get around, that's over $1000 fines, just going to meetings.
We thought, this is not good enough for our mob; they are continually being traumatised by systems, by agencies that aren't improving their quality of life. There are good social services out there, but they're not improving our people’s quality of life. They don’t know how to. They only meet their immediate needs, not the underlying issues.
Some of these services that are non-Aboriginal, have been operating within our communities, have accessed multiple generations, and there's no improvement in our quality of life. There's no pathway out to get into the economy, to save money, to get along, to get a house.
“everything is embedded and grounded in culture. Every chance we get, our Aboriginality shines”
Carly: They're treating the symptoms, not the root causes. It's not solutions focused. It’s like “we'll walk with you on this journey until you become an age where we're not funded to work with you anymore.”
Keenan: And then we'll take your kids.
That’s how we’re making a difference. By addressing immediate needs, but also the underlying issues that have brought them into challenging behaviour, and substance abuse. So, if you're homeless, we’ll address that. But how did you end up being homeless? We want to understand that.
Carly: And advocating for systemic change as well. So we provide the grassroots services and programs. But then we're also engaged in systemic advocacy.
We’re taking a decolonising approach and a life course approach; our programs are designed to intersect at different stages of someone's life where they may need support.
Keenan: And we're all about self -empowerment and giving people skills to talk for themselves.
Carly: Self-determination.
kindling & sage: What does it mean to take a decolonising approach, in practical terms?
Carly: I would explain it as the opposite to everything that's been done.
Keenan: The easiest way I explain it is that everything is embedded and grounded in culture. Every chance we get, our Aboriginality shines… The way we look after our elders, our community.
Carly: It’s also about risk assessment tools that are used to assess levels of risk in child protection or in the justice systems. They're inaccurate and have been proven as invalid in Canada, yet we're still using them to assess levels of risk. [These assessment tools mean] our communities are always going to be at risk because they don't take into consideration protective factors. A decolonising approach [means] assessing each person, case by case and understanding the context of what's going on for them.
As Carly mentioned, they work at the grassroots level through programs, but they also advocate for systemic change, for example through their Bugmy Justice Project. The purpose of this project is to provide the courts with a set of background factors on individuals during sentencing proceedings. These evidence reports will ‘identify the unique systematic racial, cultural and historical factors specific to Aboriginal people who will be sentenced by NSW Criminal Courts.’
As it currently stands, Keenan says, when you enter the criminal justice system, the courts evaluate you based on the crime you committed. First Nations offenders are often labelled as recidivous, because they relapse after their release and become repeat offenders. The Indigenous Experiences reports will let the courts know why the offender is breaking the law.
Keenan tells me that, currently at sentencing, the department is required to prepare a report with a risk assessment – it’s not about a person’s lived experience, but about their risk (which, as mentioned earlier, will always have First Nations people at the higher end of the spectrum). This risk assessment is done by NSW Probation and Parole services and is part of a pre-sentencing report.
Keenan: And that is like a 90% pathway to jail. [The pre-sentencing report] only looks at the circumstances you're living in when you committed the crime. A crime was committed and then they go back into their legal dictionary and they allocate your punishment to that crime. Doesn't matter if you're homeless, unemployed…
[In my case], I lost my mum, my dad was taken. That was heard in court, but in terms of brain development, social development, none of it was acknowledged; that I wasn’t where the other 14-year-old boys were. These Indigenous Experiences reports are about trying to treat the underlying causes, once again. How can we get these individuals the support they need so they don't have to break the law? And if they break the law, the law needs to understand that punishing them isn’t addressing why they’re breaking the law. Everybody that ends up in the criminal justice system, it’s because they made a choice and they broke the law. But what led them to that?
The next step is advocacy, lobbying and campaigning to coincide with the grassroots support to individuals, families and communities that work under this punitive system. We're making great waves in relationships and connections, but what about the next generation? So that's when we talk about raising the age of criminal responsibility, changing mandatory sentencing, better pathways to employment for people with criminal records, housing. All of these things that will decriminalise our people and get them out of the justice system, get them back into the community and then hopefully give them the skills to get their needs met without resorting to crime. Breaking into houses, stealing food, socio-economical crime: these make up the majority of offenses.
The biggest thing for me is the injustice is sort of here, what we nurture and carry. When we were born and there was no one there. We're building the help that we needed, when we needed it the most. And we will always be accountable to our people, our communities and our families. And we will change the way we do things when they tell us. We don't just do things on a whim; we try to always involve our communities in the way we deliver programs.
Carly was recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship which, when border re-open, will see her travel to the US and Canada to learn from their Gladue reports – similar to the Bugmy Justice Project. She’ll also be connecting with prison abolition advocates to learn from their experience about creating alternatives to custody and changing the narrative about people who are justice-involved.
Carly: [This is an] area that doesn't really get a lot of attention. You know, a lot of the time the wider public forgets about people who are justice-involved. Someone’s in jail, they’re a criminal, and they need to be there. Who cares what happens?
That’s something the US does really well: changing the narrative about who's in jail, why they're in jail and what happens in jail. And what sort of people do we want being released back into the community? Well-adjusted, healed people or people that have been locked in a cage, given no support and then spat back into community.
So we're trying to provide those alternatives to custody and healing: yes, this person did the wrong thing, but how can we stop them doing the wrong thing again? That's what we're about: disrupting those cycles, disrupting that intergenerational trauma and disrupting the impact that systems have on our mob and the wider community. 🔥
Want to learn more about Deadly Connections and how you can support their important work?
Head to https://deadlyconnections.org.au
