Aboriginal Incarceration Rates

Good morning/afternoon fellow ladies and gentlemen, and I am privileged to talk and outline my perspective about a dilemma, that I feel is of most importance and requires urgent action. My objective, today, is not only to persuade you to take a stand on this issue, but to present both sides of the issue to better educate you on a very important Indigenous concern, an issue that concerns and affects all of us. Settlement in Australia as a British colony first began in the year of 1788 and we are today a well-established nation. However, the first inhabitants of our land are the Aboriginals, the Indigenous, local population, were never treated as equal in any way but as victims. Do our Indigenous brothers and sisters deserve fair and equal treatment?

“These folks have been victimized twice. Once when their daughters, their sisters, their mothers have gone missing. And then, a second time when the justice system has utterly failed them in the pursuit of the justice they so rightly deserve. There can be no solution until we get to the truth in the heart of the matter, that this is a complex issue. The sources of this violence against Aboriginal women and girls is complex, but it… there’s no possibility of finding those solutions unless we actually have the truth on the table. And the resistance from this government time and time again, to have the courage and the leadership to approach this conversation and find that truth… is yet a third victimization of these families” (Pope C. & Smiley M., 2015)

Cunneens (2007) articles showed relative statistics, showing the negative effects of the relationship between the two groups, whether it is one groups wrong doing or not, the evidence shows that there is an issue that needs urgent attention and resolving. “Indigenous people were 17 times more likely to be held in custody than non-Indigenous people in Australia” this raw fact can be looked at from two different perspectives; number one the indigenous community are victimised by the police, or two a major percentage of the indigenous community are being involved in crime. Considering the indigenous population compared to the non indigenous community is so small, it does

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) in 1991 provided documentation on the death of indigenous Australians in prison or police custody. In doing so the report highlighted the substantial over representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Criminal Justice system and provided detailed analysis of underlying factors. The reports findings were believed to be the foundation of change. However, regardless of a range of policy changes and crime prevention programs in repose to the report, over representation in the criminal justice system remains. The issue is one of the most significant social justice and public policy issue in the contemporary Australian criminal justice system. The RCIADIC made 339 recommendations, most of which have been implemented into the criminal justice system over the past two decades. Never the less the systematic over representation remains prevalent. The purpose of this essay is to understand over representation as it exists in the contemporary criminal justice system. Particular emphasise will be placed on the levels of women and youths in the criminal justice system, their contact with the system and empirically based risk factors pertaining to over representation. An evaluation of alternative programs in the pre and post sentencing stage and the impact such programs would have on the over representation will be conducted.

48% percentages of Aboriginal juveniles end up in court in Australia. Therefore Australia is in need of new reforms regarding our Indigenous Australia. Reforms mean the improvement of what is wrong, corrupt and unsatisfactory. The Australian Law Reform commission is an agency that reviews the Australians law, giving improvement to access to justices and related processes making the law more equitable, fair and efficient. There are problems in our legal system that act as barrier to access of the law and inequality for indigenous Australians. There was a National Indigenous reform agreement providing a step to step how to achieve the Closing the gaps targets. COAG put $4.6 billion into closing the gap, in 2008 that were helped to health, housing,

We are learning that when genuine 'Indigenous' Justice is hiding under the cloak of Western paradigms, we continue to see the rising population of Indigenous peoples--especially Indigenous women--in prisons. Our programs and rehabilitative initiatives remain under Western paradigms, even when painted with the brush of 'restorative' or 'indigenous'

No community in Canada comes into conflict with criminal justice system officials more disproportionately than Aboriginals (Dickson-Gilmore, 2011, p.77). Indeed, Aboriginal Canadians are often subject to both overt and unintended discrimination from Canadian law enforcement due in large part to institutionalized reputations as chronic substance abusers who are incapable of reform (Dickson-Gilmore, 2011, p.77-78). One of the more startling contemporary examples of this is the case of Frank Paul; a Mi’kmaq Canadian who was left to die in a Vancouver alley by officers of the Vancouver Police Department after being denied refuge in a police “drunk tank”. Not surprisingly, this event garnered significant controversy and public outcry amongst

How often do we stop to think about the minorities of this country and how they become involved and are treated in the criminal justice system? I surmise; only some of us will concern ourselves with such details. For some like myself; we might work with individuals of the Aboriginal community or have interacted with members of this group whether through school or work. Canada “had an Aboriginal identity in 2011 of 4 % or 1.4 million people” (Kelly-Scott and Smith, 2015). Of this total there is a gross overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in Canada’s Criminal Justice System. This overrepresentation of Aboriginals in the CJS comes as a result of socio economic factors, sentencing reforms, systemic discrimination, education and employment and victimization of Aboriginal women. In partial fulfilment of this course, this paper will address the leading factors which has led to the overrepresentation of this group in the CJS.

The rights and freedoms of Aboriginals have improved drastically since 1945 with many changes to government policy, cultural views and legal rules to bring about a change from oppression to equality. Unfortunately on the other hand, some rights and freedoms have not improved at all or have even worsened.

Wright, P, and Lewis, P (2017). Close the gap Progress and Priorities Report 2017. Retrieved from https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/close-gap-progress-0

One of the most interesting things in this course is the concept of indigenous female incarceration. Court role in reducing incarceration rates for Indigenous female defendants, or whether courts have an impact on reducing incarceration rates. The interesting topographies in examining this concept is that, in order to understand indigenous female incarceration, it was argued that a new perspective of this has to be looked at for a colonial patriarchy way. An illustration of this is that indigenous populations of an established colonies were viewed as “low in the scale of social organisation, due to policies such as, protection/segregation, self-determination, assimilation and reconciliation.

In the Amnesty International report titled A brighter tomorrow, it was found that between July 2013 and June 2014, on an average night, approximately 59.4% of the young people in juvenile detention in Australia were of an indigenous heritage. During this time, the abusive treatment of a number of teenage boys at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Northern Territory was taking place and only recently was this footage shown on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Four Corners episode titled Australia’s shame. During A brighter tomorrow, Amnesty International writes about ‘The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,’ a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009 that allows the recognition of

For the last 200 years Indigenous people have been victims of discrimination, prejudice and disadvantage. Poor education, poor living conditions and general poverty are still overwhelming issues for a large percentage of our people and we remain ‘as a group, the most poverty stricken sector of the working class’ in Australia (Cuthoys 1983).

The over-representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system is a large problem in society and reasons as to why this may be occurring need to be examined (Walker & McDonald, 1995; AIC, 2013). Indigenous Australians make up less than three per cent of the overall Australian population, however Indigenous people are over-represented in Australian prison populations, with imprisonment rates that are around 12 times those of the rest of the Australian population (AIC, 2013). Rates of over-representation are even higher in juvenile detention, with a 10-17 year old Indigenous person being around 24 times more likely to be in detention than a non-Indigenous person of the same age (AIC, 2013; Cunneen & White, 2011). Indigenous Australians overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is usually due to offences pertaining to violence and public disorder (ABS, 2010; Hogg & Carrignton, 2006). This is endorsed by the fact that Indigenous Australians currently make up 40 per cent of those imprisoned for assault offences (AIC, 2013). The over representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system may be attributed to a variety of reasons, known as risk factors (AIC, 2013).

Provision [SCRGSP], 2005; Jeffries and Bond, 2012). It is also widely discussed that there is an overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system itself (Jeffries and Bond, 2009), representing up to one quarter of prisoners in Australia (Makkai and Payne, 2003; Payne, 2005). This essay will address the current issues that Indigenous Australians face within the criminal justice system, particularly, with courts. The aim of this essay besides addressing these issues will also be to provide suggestions or alternatives that may help resolve the presented issues and improve the experience for Indigenous Australians in court.