Kane Apelu celebrates resilience, ingenuity and second chances for un-housed youth in the justice system

[MUSIC] Welcome to the Worth a Second Chance podcast, where we explore true stories, challenges and solutions from the frontlines of Australia's youth justice systems. My name is Sophie Rainer. [MUSIC] Research tells us there's a clear link between youth homelessness and involvement with the criminal justice system. Young people who are unhomed are more likely to engage in what's called survival crimes, like stealing, to meet their needs, and are more likely to be seen and caught by police while they're doing it. And people already in the justice system are more likely to be homeless as they come out, because of the challenges they face in finding work and accommodation with a criminal record. If a person is experiencing homelessness or they're transient, the last thing on their mind is about how to address their underlying issues in my experience anyway. What they're focusing on is where they can safely look for the not. In Australia, 12% of people leaving youth detention will seek help from a homelessness service. And as adults, they're twice as likely to have slept rough or in squads. It's tough, but it means if you can connect a young person with a home, you might be able to interrupt that cycle and start to address the root causes of their offending behaviour. [MUSIC] On today's episode, it's Kane Arpello, who's the Housing Programs Manager at Jesuit Social Services. He talks about how housing helps provide the support and stability young people need to heal from harm, change their behaviour and reset their lives. [MUSIC] Hi Kane, I want to start by getting a bit of a picture from you. Who are the young people that you're working with? Can you describe your cohort generally? In terms of the young people that we support, the young people that have had a long history of trauma, have had involvement in the out-of-home care system, have had involvement in the justice or adult justice system, whether that be historical or current. And that also lived with neurodiverse, I guess neurodiversity, put it that way, in terms of lived experience with an intellectual disability. So I guess there's a pretty significant intersection of these young people being involved in the criminal justice system and the homeless and service system. So a lot of the support needs in my experience with my staff's experience is around addressing issues of housing instability. What are their top challenges or needs? There's variations in experiences of young people. So I'll break it down as much as I can, but I think with the cohort that are coming out of home care is that there's very limited housing options for them once they turn 18. I know there's been some initiatives that have been implemented recently, such as the better futures funding and the home streets funding that goes up to 21 years of age to help them stabilize themselves in community. But I think that's one of the most significant issues of that particular cohort coming out of home care because one, they might have established relationships with their families or extended families, but with their own, that's conducive to positive relationships or with there's an opportunity to reconnect or reunify with them in a positive way. That's another question in and of itself. So I think that there's the other contributor is, depending on the length of time, that a young person is experienced in out of home care and going between different residential facilities or if they're present with problematic behaviors and they might go into secure welfare, or if they're attending that going to they receive custody of their positions. I think it's the self-value and the self-worth of that young person and their self-esteem has really diminished because they're being bounced from place to place and the underlying issues contributing to that presentation haven't necessarily been unpacked appropriately or there might have been opportunities that have been missed. So I think the biggest significant risk factor in terms of homelessness for that particular cohort is the limited options that are available and family breakdowns and that sort of thing because at the end of the day, it wouldn't be in the our home care system if that is a stable family familial structure. There's a relationship between homelessness and involvement with the justice system. Can you describe that to me? I think the best way I can describe it is if they're really entrenched in the homeless's service system and they're engaging in defending behaviors, they graduate from level to level. So they get involved as a young person, they go through the justice system. There's interventions in place and that sort of thing about rehabilitation and adressing criminogenic needs and then that moves into them being involved in a higher level of crime or what's seen in legislation of moving into the adopt system. So I think that there's many points within that, within that spectrum where interventions could be utilized but in relating that experience back to being at risk of homelessness, it's about their capacity or their social capacity. Have they got a stable relationship with their family or their peers? Do they have a stable and consistent chatting with wraparound support that addresses their support needs? Have their offending behaviors changed in a sense or has the view of their offending behaviors shifted? Do they have an income? Where's the income coming from if they do? So there's a range of factors that are being at risk of homelessness. I think for young people that have experience of custodial dispositions and coming out of custody, I think it's a really daunting experience for them and I think the longer the time spent in custodial settings, the more chances a young person becomes institutionalized. So some of the programmes you oversee have a residential component where young people physically reside in a house, tell me more about what's happening there. It's a real focus on developing independent living skills, connected into pro social activities and also changing, trying to shift the views and perspectives of young people, what a shared living environment looks like and what it feels like. There's a lot of tangible sides of it of being valued as a person, I suppose, and developing self-worth and self-value by having furnishings within the house that are of quality. Some young people might say, "I've never had a pillar before or I've used my jumper to roll it up and use it as a pillar. I've been wearing the same socks for however long. I've been wearing the same shoes that I've had the holes and I haven't had the money or the resources to be able to to get myself good quality clothing or furnishings or whatever it may be. So it's about our interactions and practice with young people to shift away from their experiences of transactional engagement and moving multiples transformational engagement." Before we move on to talking more about your way of working with young people, I'd like to ask you another question about your approach, which uses a housing first model for supporting young people. What's that? The housing first model is basically the fundamental principle of housing first is in the name itself is to have a house first and then use the house as a foundation to work on all the underlying issues that a person may be experiencing but to have the house is very important and on the opposite of that if a person is experiencing homelessness or they transient. The last thing on their mind is about how to address their underlying issues in my experience anyway. What they're focusing on is where they can safely, safely sleep for the month. In our experience across the programs, offering the opportunity for the young person to have their own house and turn it into a home can sometimes be challenging and why I say that is because they've had limited or no experience about housing stability or place to call their own. And I think one of the, I guess my most poignant observations that I've made is a young person that was in the look you've just as has in program that lived in a three bedroom private rental. And we had noticed that this young person had set up all their furnishings and all their personal belongs in one specific area of the house. Now that might sound really intriguing, but as we unpacked that what we realized was that this young person had spent a lot of time in custody, had a long history of out of home care, had experiences of their belongings being taken and they had a real sense of sentiment of value around their belongings and what that meant to them. And so in order to keep themselves safe and to keep their belonging safe, they had a lot of value to them was to have it in a space where they could have their eyes on it all the time, which they knew where it was and that sort of thing. And also they subconsciously replicated the size of a cell in a prison setting. So anything bigger than a cell itself was completely unfamiliar to them. That's where they felt comfortable in a very small part of the house where they felt that they could control. Like I said, that they can be confronting for a lot of people to hear, but that's the reality of it. When you're in a three by four cell in a prison setting for an extended period of time, and that's all you know, but no natural light and a whole lot of noise and a whole lot of chaos. You know, it's not unexpected or you know, it's not unfamiliar to us as workers to see some of those institutional laws, behaviors, manifest in community. So being institutionalized, they get really familiar with that environment. They have they have staff at their 24 serving. There's a really rigid structure. They get locked in at certain times. They come out at certain times and engage with the other people that are engaging in similar refining behaviors or come from the same social service. We have similar trauma backgrounds and trauma histories. Now take away all that familiarity and returning into community. There's a high level of anxiety and anxiety in returning to the unknown and not having that structure and routine and wraparound support in place. So in my experience, I'll find that that transition into community needs to be gradual and needs to be considered and needs to be stepped out quite comprehensively to give those young people a better opportunity to transition into community as opposed to experiencing homelessness resorting to offending behaviors, just to survive and also, you know, in terms of survival as well. They might have peers that they're connected with in community, but more often not, they exhaust those housing options as well. I think because their peers might not be as well equipped or resource to address their needs might not understand, you know, more comprehensively, I guess, from a therapeutic perspective about what's actually happening for them. And so they burn those bridges, unfortunately. And then they're in background in custody. I think those are the major contributors to the risk of homelessness for our cohort. I'd like to shift our conversation back to those young people themselves. You and I have spoken before about the importance of respecting young people and believing in them. Can you tell me more about fostering young people's sense of self-worth in your approach to your work? I think it's really founded upon the organizational ethos of walking beside someone as opposed to in front or behind and it's getting a really good understanding in a safe and appropriate way of the stories of these young people, what they'd like to achieve and how we can support them to achieve those goals. I think further to that as well is not discounting or devaluing the resilience of these young people as well. They're quite persistent and consistent and very resourceful. And they have transferable skills to a degree. If I like to think of transferable skills being that they might have offending behaviours, but their skills in those offending behaviours that could translate over to something more positive and more of the not young people might laugh with me and I'll say, well, I know part of your offending history is breaking in to's or motor vehicle offences or theft and robbery or it might be dealing substances and that sort of thing. And so we try and unpack some of those skills from that in a positive way and reframing. So if we talk about breaking in to cars, what's the reason for you breaking in to cars? Do you have an interest in mechanics? Are you a good driver in your opinion? Do you have a license? And if you don't have a license, maybe we look into another new vehicle, put you on a positive trajectory as opposed to offending in that way. It sounds really facetious in the way that I'm explaining it, but I guess it's more of a pulling at the strengths of the young people in whatever behaviours their exhibiting and reminding them that they can use those skills and those talents in a more positive way. That's fantastic. I'm going to ask you to solve some problems here. If you've got unlimited money, unlimited resources, unlimited time, what are some of the interventions that could be resourced to address those homelessness risk factors? I think more broadly from a societal perspective is to promote foster and reinforce the importance of compassion to your fellow human being. I think there has been a lot of societal views of a negative nature about those that offend and experience homelessness. You hear through media about why can't they just get a job, get off cinnamon, stop being a dull bludger, all that sort of stuff. So I think that that metric is not helpful. So I think more broadly at a societal level, that needs to be, I guess, fostered around that value of compassion. So if we were to align to funding, it's really that the marketing aspect of it and really trying to change the psychological views of society as a whole. And that's an impossible task, but that's not to say that we can't make steps towards that. In terms of the physical aspect of funding, in my vision is that everybody has a home. And it's a basic human need to have a home, to have a place that you can call your own, to have to feel safe and to really flourish. So for me, in terms of funding, it'll be to build more houses and not just houses, but to have support in place to develop participants views about their self-worth and self-veilies. So it's not just the house anymore, we're shifting that physical aspect of it in a psychological sense to it being their home. On that point, you just made about self-worth and self-belief. The assumption I've made here is that Jesuit social services, relational way of working, walking alongside a young person, accompanying them, seeing the young person as a whole person, sort of philosophy. Is that uncommon compared to how young people in the system have been treated before? Yes, I think so. In our experience, I think there's a range of reasons for that happen, why that happens. I think the major structural issue is that the community sector is under-resourced. In terms of key performance indicators, it really becomes quantity as a quality. And I think for us at Jesuit social services is the importance of making sure that not only do we name with young people that your value does a human and what we'd like to see for you to develop is that to have belief in yourself, I know that we believe in you. We believe that you can get to the point where you believe that you can make a significant positive change in your life. So I think the relational model of the LWR working framework that we use within the organization is really pertinent to building respectful and trusting relationships. I think for a lot of young people that we've supported in the housing programs is that you can see behaviors that are exhibited or manifested in a way of not being used or not being familiar with someone that's actually showing genuine care about their well-being and their welfare. And I think that's also intertwined with trauma-informed practice, understanding, trauma, understanding that you're trying to show them a different experience and they might react in a way that you might not expect or might seem unusual. They might get defensive or agitated or aggressive. But that's because they haven't been shown that before. So it takes a while to get used to. One final question for you. How important is a young person having self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence in them slowing or interrupting their cycle of offending? It's the most important in my view. And I think it aligns with other values as well, that determination, motivation around wanting to change. If those those aspects of self belief, self confidence and self-esteem don't exist or they exist in a very limited way. The chances and opportunities to change that trajectory in terms of refanding values is slim to none. And I think in addressing a fending behaviour, it's not going to happen overnight. It's a lifelong journey and sometimes participants might revert back to what they know and that goes back to the theme I was speaking about earlier but going back to where they feel comfortable and feel safe and feel familiar with because change isn't easy and when change is implemented the outcomes that come from that is confusing. It's like, I can actually do something. I put my mind into this and it's happening. I've always envisioned something like this. I never knew that it comes to fruition or this is what it looked like but here I am. Now what do I do with it? Now at that point is where you go, you've achieved something really really important here and you should be proud of yourself and know that we as practitioners and as an organisation are proud of you too and that's a good way to build on that and you gotta keep going, keep persisting. We're resilient young person, you can be resilient through some very traumatic experiences. This one here is a different experience that you're not familiar with but hey, we'll work through that too. That was Kena Pellu speaking to Wortha Second Church about housing, homelessness and the youth justice system. Wortha Second Chance is a community campaign from Jesuit Social Services. We're calling for a more fair, humane and effective youth justice system and we need your help. Learn more and join the campaign at WorthaSecondChance.com.au. Thanks to Kena Pellu for speaking with me today and you can find new conversations every second Wednesday. My name is Sophie Rainer and this was Wortha Second Chance.