Supreme Court Chief Justice Chris Kourakis hits out at South Australia indigneous jail toll

ABORIGINAL incarceration rates are a national disgrace which have been ignored by governments for 25 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the state’s top judge says.

SOUTH Australia’s top judge has slammed successive governments for ignoring spiralling indigenous incarceration rates for 25 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Chief Justice Chris Kourakis quoted disturbing statistics — including that 46 per cent of youths incarcerated in SA juvenile detention are Aboriginal — to emphasise his point that indigenous offending is at crisis point.

Speaking exclusively to The Advertiser, Chief Justice Kourakis said governments must urgently intervene to address root causes of crime such as poverty, education and unemployment.

“And it’s not just a crisis for the indigenous community, it’s a crisis for our whole community,” he said.

“The effect of losing their productivity as employed members of the community is a big loss and the cost through the criminal justice system is a huge cost for all of us.”

Chief Justice Kourakis will next month host a conference bringing together indigenous community and support service representatives, government departments, legal professionals and academics.

The conference has the long term aim of finding strategies to help reduce the Aboriginal incarceration rate to three per cent — in line with the number of indigenous people in the SA community.

The Chief Justice said the conference would examine ways to improve basic health, education and employment prospects for young Aboriginal people, who he said were at a distinct sociological disadvantage.

“I have described it as continued institutional degradation, because that whole community is being denied any real place in our community, it’s a social crisis,” he said.

Chief Justice Kourakis said that successive governments had failed to address the worsening problem, despite more than 300 strident recommendations in the 1991 report.

“In fact things have become worse ... the main thrust of the report was that there is overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in prison, hence why death rates were higher,” he said.

“Since then there’s been some good work on reducing the opportunities for self-harm in jail, but there has been next to no work on stopping the revolving door.”

However, Chief Justice Kourakis emphasised that lowering Aboriginal incarceration rates would not be reached by giving indigenous offenders special treatment.

“Courts aren’t going to just start reducing sentences because of Aboriginal disadvantage and we’re not going to start reducing sentences because the jails are overcrowded,” he said.

“Unless these root causes are dealt with and we have stable places to release them into the community, the over representation of Aboriginal people is going to remain high.”

The Chief Justice said he believed governments had wrongly viewed the issue as too great to implement practical solutions, which he acknowledged would require large amounts of funding.

“It’s a question of finding out what money we’ve got, government departments have competing priorities they’ve got to work out,” he said.

Chief Justice Kourakis said programs such as Nunga courts — in which Aboriginal elders take part — were an example of progress but said more support was needed for indigenous people on bail or parole.

“The reports I’ve heard is that the most effective part of the sentencing hearing is through that interaction with the Aboriginal elders,” he said.

“There is engagement a real sense of shame evident on the faces of the offender, when they are scalded by the Aboriginal elder, it means much more to them.”

He said bail hostels which are due to be introduced could include a facility targeted at indigenous people, and that they should be staffed by Aboriginal people.

“You’d have Aboriginal people employed as staff, you could have Aboriginal elders on an advisory group to the management of that hostel, there are many models that could be used,” he said.

“There has got to be a much higher number of Aboriginal persons employed and trained in community corrections.”

The Chief Justice said judges were often saddened at having to impose lengthy prison terms upon Aboriginal offenders who had endured impoverished and abusive backgrounds.

“By the time we are sentencing we don’t have a lot of options, what is really important is the commitment of these elders and that their knowledge gets used in community corrections,” he said.