Alice Springs cultural revitalisation program is ’breaking the cycle’ of incarceration

An Alice Springs cultural revitalisation program is breaking the cycle of incarceration in young Indigenous men. Read why it’s being hailed as an alternative to prison.

Providing a pathway for young Indigenous men to embrace their passions and get in touch with their cultural identity is making major headway in breaking the cycle of incarceration in Central Australia.

Kings Narrative is a social enterprise in Alice Springs working with young Indigenous men to provide cultural revitalisation programs and native therapy to allow them to “re-author their own stories”.

Founder and managing director Tyson Carmody said the program was making major inroads by providing a space for Central Australian men to understand the story behind their actions.

Speaking at the launch of a new Justice Reform Initiative report, which called for $300m to bolster the Territory’s “chronically underfunded” crime prevention sector, Mr Carmody said he often saw young men in cycles of hopelessness due to incarceration.

Kings Narrative founder and managing director Tyson Carmody said the social enterprise had been making major headway in getting young men out of the cycle of incarceration and into meaningful programs leading to employment.

“Often when we’re talking to young men and people in juvie we’re asking ‘what are you going to do when you get out?’ it’s like they don’t even hope for something more because they know when they get out it’s just going to be the same and they’ll end up back here.

“A lot of people say well ‘do the crime do the time’ and it drives me crazy to hear that all the time, they go back to the same situation and the same environment that allowed them to get into this.

“Yes take responsibility for your actions, but when you go back to the same environment, where is the hope?

Mr Carmody used the example of a new barber project centred around a young Indigenous man who had been stuck in the cycle of incarceration since 12 years old to detail how investing into crime prevention programs was a more effective alternative to prisons.

“Blak Kings is a barber project that we’ve developed around a young person who’s just released from juvie because he liked cutting hair there and he was good at it,” he said.

“This young fella we are working with, we’re training him up and he’ll train other young people up through the course and be employed at Kings Narrative as a barber.

“And this young fella has been locked up pretty much since he was 12 years old.

“$1.4 million to keep a young person locked up each year, what could we do with $1.4 million in creating initiatives like these.

“We really want to be creative, we don’t want to do things the way they’ve been done, the way you’ve been doing it. We want to do it our way

“We’ve been making major headway with that process.”

He said changing the language used around investing and funding Indigenous businesses would be key in altering the ‘tough on crime’ narrative currently being pushed in Alice Springs.

“The language we talk about is don’t fund me to run your programs, invest in me to run my programs, we really want to change that language around funding and investments,” he said.

“So invest, invest not just in King’s Narrative, invest in Aboriginal people and Aboriginal businesses. There are so many people in the community doing great work and we want them on this platform.

“Because there is a different approach and a new approach, and it's the preferred approach.”