David Dungay Jr died in Sydney’s Long Bay prison in 2015. In the opening scene of the documentary Incarceration Nation, Dunghutti woman Aunty Leetona Dungay, David’s mother, sets the scene for what viewers are about to witness.
While David Dungay’s family’s campaign was not discussed in depth in the documentary, there’s no question why they have lodged a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Committee to seek accountability for the guards involved in his death. David Dungay’s death is one of about 500 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the Royal Commission report was released in 1991. No one has ever been held accountable for these deaths.
Directed by Guugu Yimithirr man Dean Gibson, Incarceration Nation is relentless and emotionally demanding of its audience. This is due to scenes of explicit violence perpetrated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people - especially children - by those in authority. It might be one of the most disturbing things you ever watch. […]
First Nations people make up 3.3% of Australia’s population. Yet 65% of children incarcerated in this country between the ages of 10 and 13 are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. First Nations children make up 55% of the child prison population overall. Aboriginal women, the fastest growing prison population, make up 34% of those incarcerated in women’s prisons.
While these statistics are often used by criminologists and the state to represent the problem as one of “over-representation”, in reality they reflect the colonial function of incarceration in the Australian settler colony — to further the erasure of First Nations people. These statistics are increasingly recognised as a serious breach of human rights internationally.
Yet in Australia, despite demands from First Nations communities to prioritise decarceration and community-based responses to ensure our safety, state and territory governments continue to prioritise carceral expansion. There are even plans to build more prisons and increase policing resources.
Keenan Mundine, co-founder of Deadly Connections, an Aboriginal community-led organisation that provides services to First Nations people impacted by child removal and carceral systems, responds to the issue of underfunded Aboriginal community organisations and increasing police budgets in the documentary:
[police have] been given more resources and more funding, to do what they do best, which is terrorising Aboriginal communities.
Incarceration Nation weaves together historical records, archival footage, statistics, expert advice, and the testimonies of individuals with lived experience and families who have lost loved ones in custody. For First Nations viewers and our advocates, aspects of this documentary stand within a powerful apparatus to expose the systemic, colonial underpinnings of Australia’s “justice” system. […] For this documentary to move beyond identifying this problem - one consistently highlighted by First Nations people and communities - it requires non-First Nations people, particularly white people, to change.
Change will not be achieved through reform, but through the abolition of the colonial system […]. From the views expressed by many First Nations people in Incarceration Nation, including public servants, it is clear that expectations of policies and programs to ensure “stronger” relationships between Aboriginal people and police have lapsed. What is being requested now is that policing and imprisonment be overhauled and dismantled.
Trusting in carceral reforms alone is, in fact, a dangerous solution. As Yuin Aunty Vickie Roach, an advocate for prison abolition, highlights in the documentary, it is not possible to fix a system that is not broken, but rather operating exactly as it was designed to do.
Headline, subheadings, graphics, and all text published by: Latoya Aroha Rule, Lilly Brown, and Natalie Ironfield. “Incarceration Nation exposes the racist foundations of policing and imprisonment in Australia, but at what cost?” The Conversation. 30 August 2021.
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