Re-imagining youth justice: Cultural contestation in the Kimberley region of Australia since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
| Author | Harry Blagg |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480611436360 |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Theoretical Criminology
16(4) 481 –498
Re-imagining youth justice:
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480611436360
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the Kimberley region of
Australia since the 1991 Royal
Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody
Harry Blagg
Plymouth University, UK
Abstract
Twenty years on from the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in
Australia the picture appears bleaker than in the early 1990s. This article adopts a post-
colonial stance to examine emerging Aboriginal strategies on youth justice in Western
Australia that focus on building forms of Aboriginal ‘cultural capital’ and ‘community owned’
justice mechanisms on Aboriginal country as an alternative to failed strategies of incar-
ceration and ‘community based’ justice. Aboriginal contestation, or what I call, after Edward
Said, ‘contrapuntality’ increasingly takes place through subtle ‘inter-cultural’ work in various
‘engagement spaces’ in-between Aboriginal and mainstream cultures. These practices
challenge mainstream government to practise what it preaches in relation to its claimed
respect for Aboriginal cultural rights. The article reports on Aboriginal owned and controlled
cultural processes in the Kimberley region of Western Australia that are contrapuntally
challenging established ideas about the meaning of justice for Aboriginal youth.
Keywords
Aboriginal justice, contestation, cross-cultural comparison, cultural, decolonizing, post-
colonization, youth
Corresponding author:
Harry Blagg, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 19 Portland Villas, Plymouth University, Plymouth,
PL4 8AA, UK
Email: harry.blagg@plymouth.ac.uk
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Theoretical Criminology 16(4)
Introduction
The year 2011 marked the 20th anniversary of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody in Australia (Johnson, 1991). This inquiry (generally referred to as
Rikadik in Aboriginal Creole, a practice I will adopt in this article) emerged as a result of
pressure from Aboriginal Australians to reform radically what they perceived to be a
systemically racist and, indeed, homicidally inclined justice system, imposed from above
to meet the interests of white colonists and entrench white power and privilege. Rikadik
concluded that Aboriginal deaths in custody were a consequence of unacceptably high
rates of Aboriginal over-representation in the custodial system. The need to reduce over-
representation by diverting Indigenous offenders, particularly young offenders, away from
contact with the criminal justice system was a key focus its 339 recommendations. Twenty
years on from Rikadik the picture appears bleaker than in the early 1990s. The persistence
of the problem has been referred to as a source of ‘national shame’ (House of Representatives
Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, 2011: 17). A number
of commentators have suggested that youth justice policies and practices ‘comprise fluid
sites of contestation and uneasy settlements’ (Goldson and Muncie, 2006: 93; see also
Goldson, 2002; Muncie and Hughes, 2002). This is certainly the case in Australia. However,
I will suggest, the political and cultural foundations for ‘contestation’ in relation to poli-
cies and practices towards the most imprisoned group in Australia, Indigenous youth,
cannot be understood without reference to white Australia’s annexation and colonization
of Aboriginal Australia, a fact acknowledged by a number of critical criminologists in
Australia (Anthony, 2009, 2010 ; Broadhurst, 1999; Cunneen, 2008, 2011). Some critics
have denounced criminology’s ‘silence’ on the links between colonial power and criminal
justice (Agozino, 2003). Cunneen (2011: 252) suggests that a postcolonial perspective
can help break the silence by bringing to criminology an acknowledgement of the ‘long-
term impact of colonization and imperialism’ and invites us to begin an ‘analysis of the
structures of sentiment and ideology that determine the intersections of race, crime and
punishment’. The perspective adopted in this article is based upon a ‘post-colonial’ read-
ing of current developments in one particular region of Australia.
A ‘locally contexted’ post-colonial analysis
Post-colonial perspectives are interested in articulating and privileging the subjugated
knowledge of colonized peoples and identifying the ways colonial structures of domination
are negotiated and subverted by the colonized (Bhaba, 1994; Moore-Gilbert, 1997). They
also stress the extent to which colonization takes place in the realms of culture and knowl-
edge. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) talks, for example, of the ‘epistemological vio-
lence’ of colonization—and colonization as a process of ‘worlding’ where the colonized
space is inscribed by the worldview of the colonizer. If nations are ‘imagined communities’
(Anderson, 1983); then de-colonization involves a ‘re-imagining’ and re-mapping of place,
time and space (Ashcroft et al., 1998; Said, 1994, 2003; Spivak, 1996; Young, 1990). An
Aboriginal re-imagining and re-mapping of youth justice space shifts the focus from main-
stream institutions (courts, detention centres, community based offices) to sites of ritual
and symbolic significance to Aboriginal people. This decolonization process represents,
Blagg
483
for many Aboriginal leaders, a necessary step in the creation of genuinely self-determining
communities. Aboriginal elders in the Kimberley talk of the damage created when the old,
draconian, administrative mechanisms of control that had kept Aboriginal people in check
(government and religious missions, feeding stations, etc.) suddenly withdrew in the 1960s.
It led to a rapid movement into regional towns and an impoverished existence as ‘fringe
dwellers’ on the margins of white society. It would be simplistic to see this sudden with-
drawal as an act of de-colonization. Rather it represented a shift in governmental strategies
regarding the management of Aboriginal affairs, from overt paternalism to one of governing
from a distance. Aboriginal elders see decolonization in terms of creating a new relation-
ship with the white mainstream, not being abandoned by it.
I intend to make sense of Aboriginal people’s strategies of re-imagining and re-mapping
in the Kimberley by employing post-colonial theorist Edward Said’s (1994) notion of
‘contrapuntality’. The notion’s musical origin suggests the creation of counter-points and
the combination of independent, melodic parts playing together. This kind of construct
may not sit well with traditional views of the ‘colonial struggle’ in terms of outright
opposition and bloody resistance, but it speaks to a particular set of strategies currently
being deployed by Aboriginal people in the Kimberley that are concerned with generating
new alignments, relationships and structures through which they can express a radical
alterity: not by confrontational opposition, but by challenging the Australian state to abide
by its own, new-found, ‘respect’ for Aboriginal cultural rights. These strategies are subtly
transgressive rather than openly subversive: in a Foucauldian sense they could be said to
operate within, rather than outside, structures of power. On the other hand, there is, I will
suggest, implicit within these contrapuntal movements, a ‘soul of revolt’ (Foucault, 1988)
nurtured by a powerful adherence to Aboriginal law and culture that resists assimilation
into mainstream structures of power.
Aboriginal youth over-representation
Western Australia has the highest rate of Indigenous over-representation in Australia at all
stages of the criminal justice system, and had the highest rate of custodial deaths in the
Rikadik era. Aboriginal youth have early and repeated contact with the justice system; they
are around 28 times more likely than non-Aboriginal youths to be arrested and 25 times
more likely to be detained in custody in Western Australia (Blagg and Ferrante, 1995;
Ferrante et al., 2004, 2005; Johnson, 1991).1 The rate of over-representation of Aboriginal
young people in the system is 40–50 times more than non-Aboriginal youth. In 2007,
around 80 per cent of non-Aboriginal young people were being diverted from Court, while
only 55 per cent of young Aboriginal people were diverted (Harker, 2010). On any day
upwards of 80 per cent of the young people incarcerated in Western Australia is Aboriginal:
they constitute less than 4 per cent of the relevant population. Roughly 80 per cent of youths
imprisoned under Western Australia’s home-burglary mandatory sentencing laws are
Aboriginal, of whom 60 per cent are from the Kimberley (Blagg, 2008; Morgan et al.,
2001). Criminologists have not always agreed on the reasons behind these high rates of
detention (see, for example, the interchange between Cunneen (2005) and Weatherburn
et al. (2003)). Blagg (2008) reports a growing consensus among Aboriginal groups that it
reflects a complex mix of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, involving massive over-policing and
484
Theoretical Criminology 16(4)
racist law and order politics on the one hand, and a greater level of offending and social
disorganization on the other. Aboriginal elders, as I will demonstrate, have genuine fears
about their children becoming enmeshed in the justice system and a criminal life-style, as
well as believing that the current system is ineffective in dealing with them.
It is important to view the statistics in...
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