Australia Imprisons Aboriginals Disproportionately
Australia Imprisons Aborigines Disproportionately
The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples has called for the federal government to increase its “Closing the Gap” goals. Closing the Gap currently aims to reduce the disproportionate overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system by funding legal services and family violence prevention services for Aboriginals while improving conditions for indigenous prisoners. The congress recommended goals of reducing by half the incarceration rate and rate of exposure to violence among Aboriginal people.
The latest national statistics show that Aboriginal adults are incarcerated at 14 times the rate of non-indigenous people and the Aboriginal juvenile incarceration rate is 31 times that of other juveniles. Interest in the plight of Aboriginal people was raised following the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, but, according to the congress, had diminished to the point that in recent years "action and progress has been non-existent.”
"This overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is a national disgrace and an international embarrassment, requiring urgent action," the congress said in its justice policy. "The commitment to one of the core recommendations of the royal commission—that imprisonment should only be used as a last resort—has been lost."
The statistics show that indigenous people, who make up 2.3% of the population of Australia, represented over 28% of the population of its adult prisons in 2008. 48% of the incarcerated juveniles in Australian are Aboriginal. Between 2000 and 2010, the incarceration rate for Aboriginal men increased by 35%, while it increased 60% for Aboriginal women.
The over incarceration of Aboriginal people is not evenly spread throughout Australia. In the Northern Territory and Western Australia, they make up 84% and 43% of the prison population, while in the rest of Australia, they average 17%. Aborigines are less than 5% of any state's population except in the Northern Territories, where they are 31.6%. Further, since 1989, the incarceration rate for indigenous people has risen 12 times faster than the rest of the population. Thus, Aboriginal adults are 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites while Aboriginal juveniles are 21 times more likely.
In Western Australia, where Aboriginal incarceration rates nearly doubled between 1990 and 2010, indigenous adults are 48 times more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts.
Sources: The Australian, www.standard.net, www.creativespirits.info
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