Joe Kwon On Helping Incarcerated Australians Prepare For A Brighter Future

At the age of 21 Joe was sentenced to 13 years in prison for directing a criminal enterprise. During his time in prison, he met a positive mentor who challenged his perceptions and attitudinal outlook on life.

Joe learnt about business and the value of education, but most importantly his mentor taught him about self-worth from a prison cell. From directing a criminal enterprise, today Joe is the Founder and CEO of a social enterprise (Confit) and a NFP (Confit Pathways) where he mentors that sense of self worth to inmates to thrive in society. Joe's mission is to help reduce recidivism in Australia and create employment and education opportunities for individuals coming out of custody by breaking down societies preconceived notions of inmate stereotypes and providing community support through mentors with lived prison experience.

Joe is known to be a catalyst and innovator, using lived experience to create a platform to bridge the social gap between former inmates and the wider society through fitness. He is a 2022 Westpac Social Fellow and a 2022 Snow Entrepreneur. Through his lived experience and knowledge of fitness Joe is helping people from all walks of life train to be free.

Joe discusses How his time in incarceration led to him discovering innovative ways to reduce recidivism and why providing wraparound support to former inmates helps them thrive in the next chapter of their lives.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are today?

[Joe Kwon] - In a nutshell, I grew up in a community that was very marginalised, full of violence and substance abuse, and I never had any male role models or figures that guided me along a positive path. I came from a very broken household with a lot of domestic violence, and naturally, all these young people coming from broken households gravitate towards each other. I ended up joining a gang at a young age and dropped out of high school in Year 10. That was pretty much my path of crime until I was arrested at the age of 21. I was sentenced to 13 years in prison for directing a criminal enterprise and the sale of large commercial quantities of drugs. Honestly, until then, I thought that would be my path in life. Then I went to prison and realised looking around there was a common denominator for inmates, people there usually had some sort of childhood trauma, disadvantage, and most commonly a lack of education. I fit that statistic; I dropped out of school in Year 10. I asked all these people known to be career criminals, "look, if you're that good at crime, why do you keep coming back to jail?" Their response was, " if you want to be a part of this game, expect to come to jail more often." I was already doing a 13-year sentence and I didn't want to come back to jail. I wanted to change my life around but didn't know how to do that. Surprisingly, I ended up meeting a positive mentor while I was in custody. He was my cellmate, a billionaire accountant.

He came to prison for Australia's largest tax fraud, and not only did he teach me accounting every day, but he taught me about business, the value of education, and most importantly, self-worth. It was those teachings that carried me forward.

I ended up doing my HSC in jail, got accepted into the University of New South Wales, graduated and today I run a social enterprise and not for profit. We are helping individuals that have been affected by the justice system to find pathways to employment, education through providing wraparound support. This is done through mentors with lived prison experience; they can relate to people that are incarcerated or coming out of incarceration because they’ve walked that same walk. We are a fitness-based organisation. I think everyone can resonate with me when I say this, but during lockdown fitness became so important for mental health. That was my saving grace when I was incarcerated. I used to train every day, and even though my body was incarcerated, whenever I used to train, my mind used to be free. Our slogan for ConFit is ‘train to be free’ because we're not just helping incarcerated individuals to change their lives around, but also people from all walks of life. People in the community approach us to help them not just around fitness, but also having a more resilient mindset and being more positive. Even though they're not incarcerated, sometimes in life there's a metaphorical prison. We help people in society train to be free, especially during lockdown. We're helping employees of companies such as Atlassian and Google to train to be free, and who better to do that than those who have experienced incarceration?

As the founder of ConFit, can you tell us a little bit more about what the work is that they're doing, the size of your team and the impact you're generating?

Currently, we are based in New South Wales, predominantly in Sydney. We have a team of eight mentors with lived prison experience. They're all fitness trainers and they've changed their lives around. It's a quite specific criteria to join our team, and we have both men and women. We currently go into every youth justice centre across New South Wales except for one. There are six in total, and we're in five centres across those six. We provide mentoring for young people that are currently incarcerated. We run nine-week programs based around fitness.

Fitness is a way to engage and break down barriers, then we talk about topics such as gratitude, self-worth, goal setting, and anything else that we need to have a positive mindset while incarcerated. We also share tools that can help them when they transition out into the community.

We're about to open a gym in Parramatta, so we do provide ongoing support. We have a through care model, but that has been a little bit disjointed because all our mentors (either gym managers or trainers at individual gyms) are dispersed across Sydney. What we're trying to do now is have a one location we can call our headquarters, then we can have people coming out of the justice system to receive ongoing mentoring at this one place. We're now hiring individuals full time to work as mentors and trainers. It's a social enterprise model, so that means we receive revenues from memberships we sell to the community to have people come train with us. We then direct a lot of those profits back to our social cause and programs we run in youth justice centres. We also target adults in corrections, so we're now piloting a program. We're trialling this across four different centres in New South Wales, and the whole idea was that right now in society there's a huge shortage of skilled labour, not just in the fitness industry, but in all industries. We started asking, "how do we provide that education and upskilling for individuals sitting idly in corrections?" Now we’ve got a partnership with TAFE New South Wales and the Australian Institute of Fitness, where they provide Cert 3 and Cert 4 Certification for inmates. People love training in jail anyway, and now they get qualified. Then, they can come out to our gym where we provide an eight-week upskilling program through a partnership with One Playground Academy. During the eight weeks, they are now onboarded onto our community and get that wraparound support. We've got partnerships in the fitness industry that provide employment into the fitness industry. This is not just to become a personal trainer, but it's the fitness industry more generally. That's pretty much what we do as a social enterprise, we don't just focus on the fitness industry. We also have partnerships with multiple other industries such as hospitality, rail, construction, and marketing. Some of these young people might not want to work in the fitness industry, so we've got other options for them as well. But we understand also that education has been a huge key to not just change, but all our mentors right now who are working with us. We've got a partnership with the University of New South Wales, where we provide full scholarships and campus accommodation for young people in our program who want to pursue higher education as well.

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What are some of the lesser-known factors for reducing recidivism?

We all know the common factors, which include reducing substance abuse issues, creating housing for individuals coming out of the justice system, providing employment pathways or employment education. But as for the lesser-known factors, one is what we're trying to do, which is advocate to society about society's negative preconceived notions of inmate stereotypes. This is then a barrier to other opportunities. Straight away when you meet people, you must mention you're on parole to prospective employers or your community. It's becoming about how do you get that acceptance? How do you break down that barrier and lack of trust from the beginning? That's one of our biggest missions when we're creating this gym, we're advocating to society as well. We understand there is a very small minority of people we believe should not be let out of custody, but that is a very small minority. Like I said before, most of the individuals who are currently incarcerated stem from childhood trauma, disadvantage, and the lack of opportunities as well.

Instead of looking at the exact crime they've committed, understand they are serving their time for those actions. But we should be looking deeper into the root causes, circumstances and environment(s) that led them to doing that crime.

It's more about educating through stories of lived experience and letting people know that not everyone is bad. They're not bad people, it's just the circumstances that led them to that point. Another thing to consider are psychological factors, a lot of inmates that are coming out of custody have a lack of self-worth. Once again, a sense of societal acceptance, belonging, and having a supportive community to help you are vital. This is why we employ individuals with lived prison experiences, to be case studies of people that have come out of the system, changed their life and are doing something positive in the community. For people to see that is a huge morale boost. These things are more the non-tangible aspects that need to be worked on. There's not too much of a focus on that right now, everyone's saying, "get them a house, education, employment, and they should be sweet." But sometimes, even when you get a house, how do you pay rent? Maybe these jobs don't provide a sense of purpose or accomplishment, so then they burn out quickly. In education, ex-inmates might question why they should educate themselves? If no one was educated in your household, there may be no sense of wanting to educate yourself. Knowing that is super important, it’s a part of what we do through our mentoring programs.

As a professional working in this space with former and current inmates, what are some of the challenges and opportunities you are seeing?

Referring to what we're doing, I guess scalability is always an issue. How do we create autonomous teams not just in Sydney, but in regional areas as well, because there are a lot of centres based in regional communities. There are a lot of people from regional areas getting incarcerated, and how do we go into other states? That's always been an issue we're trying to work around. There's also the question of the working with children check. If you work in the youth justice space but have lived prison experience, New South Wales is probably the easiest state to obtain the working with children check. I know in Queensland they call it a Blue Card, and it’s impossible for people with lived prison experience to be able to obtain this. Other states and territories are different as well, that is a challenge we're trying to solve. Once again, we're trying to collaborate with other not for profits that are delivering programs not just in the youth justice space, but that are working with children and people with prison experience. We believe this should be done under one body, one federal selection or criteria. Not every individual state and territory having their own rules and regulation policies. We're trying to really push for that.

The work we do, of reducing recidivism, cannot be done by one individual or organisation. There's a lot of cross sector collaboration, partnerships with a lot of other individuals working in this space and trying to grow that is a huge opportunity.

I've come across a few organisations recently who have really impressed me that I've been wanting to work with. The use of tech is something very interesting now. During lockdown, most correctional settings started using tablets. There were no contact visits because people in custody were considered a vulnerable population. All the visits were done through these tablets, and through that came a lot of opportunities regarding inmates making phone calls to their families using the tablets they could access in their cells. Now there were opportunities of providing education through these tablets, whereas before it was very hard to come across computers in prison. This is solving a lot of the issues around educating and providing materials for inmates while they're in custody. Another thing is the use of apps. With our mentoring program, we deliver nine-week programs to Sydney Metropolitan Centres. But when it comes to regional centres, it's very hard to provide ongoing mentoring and support out in the community. We're about to develop an app where we're able to engage young people without any boundaries. It's a two-way communication system, includes videos and it's very interactive.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

Last week I ended up meeting an organisation called ReLove. They're like the OzHarvest of the furniture business. I didn't even know this, but apparently furniture is the second largest landfill after food waste. What they're doing is collecting second hand furniture from commercial businesses such as hotels and refurbishing them. Then, they have an IKEA style warehouse stocking this furniture. This is not just for people from the justice system, but people in public housing such as those moving from domestic violence or refugees. When these marginalised communities get access to public housing, there's often no furniture. How do you solve that issue? ReLove bring them along to their warehouse, and they've got every section, such as kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom, and they can choose what they want. They’re doing a lot of corporate teams building stuff activities, where they bring corporates in to do reupholstering challenges for furniture. I thought it was a cool idea solving two different social issues. Another organisation is one of our partners Plate it Forward, they're a restaurant providing meals to the less fortunate. They hire a lot of refugees, and they're about to open a restaurant called Kiev Social where they're hiring refugees from Ukraine to make Ukrainian food. I thought that was a cool concept, but they've just recently done a program in youth justice centres, where they're bringing celebrity chefs in and teaching young people how to fall in love with the hospitality industry. They just hired three of those young people who have come through their program.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

One book that stayed with me was a book I read while I was incarcerated; it's called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a clinical psychiatrist who lived in the concentration camps during Nazi occupation. The book is about his search for meaning and purpose in life while living through this hostile environment. Reading that book was a real perspective changer. Another recommendation is THE CLINK Podcast. It's called Stories of Redemption, it's about individuals who have come out of prison and are doing positive things in society today.