Keeping focus on roots of indigenous incarceration

Tens of thousands of Australians took part in Black Lives Matter protests, mirroring rallies around the world, to express outrage and sorrow for the intolerable killing of African-American George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Yet some activists have conflated that tragedy and the long history of racially motivated police brutality in the US with the high rate of indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody here. It’s naive and wrongheaded to see US despair and injustice as playing out on our soil. For starters, the core issues are complex, with vastly different cultural and institutional factors in the two countries. Still, we need to think carefully about how to improve the way we police and when we incarcerate, and the factors that bring offenders to jail.

The Morrison government is right to seek more ambitious targets for decreasing the number of Aboriginal Australians in jail as it overhauls the Closing the Gap policy to reduce indigenous disadvantage. Since 2008 the program has tried, but not done enough, to improve the lives and life chances of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. While governments have focused on health, education and employment outcomes, and spent more on programs, progress has been patchy and slow. Just two of the seven targets set 12 years ago by Kevin Rudd — early childhood education and Year 12 attainment — were achieved. Targets for school attendance, child mortality, employment, life expectancy, and literacy and numeracy have not been reached. In December 2018, the Council of Australian Governments opted for a policy refresh with new targets, including one for justice.

As we reported on Tuesday, Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt is pushing for each state and territory to adopt specific incarceration targets. An earlier draft opted for a 5 per cent fall in the detention rate among adults and an 11 to 19 per cent drop among youths by 2028. Canberra will take a higher target to the negotiations with the states next month. Mr Wyatt said if we want to reduce deaths in custody, we need to look very closely at what’s happening in Australia, “the factors contributing to incarceration rates and the way in which our systems are handling these incidents”.

Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, the rate at which indigenous people have died in jail as a percentage of the Aboriginal prison population has fallen; it is now below the non-indigenous prison population. An Australian Institute of Criminology study over 15 years shows 58 per cent of indigenous deaths in custody were deemed to be from “natural causes”. As Paul Maley writes on Wednesday, the justice system has “sensitised” itself to the vulnerabilities of indigenous offenders, with a range of measures to reduce risk of harm. When they hit the courts, indigenous offenders draw lower average sentences. Still, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of indigenous people in the prison system has increased from 19 per cent in 2000 to nearly 30 per cent in March this year. There are 12,900 indigenous people in prisons. At the last census, indigenous people made up just under 3 per cent of the population.

As we have long argued, underlying causes of indigenous offending need to be fixed. Labor’s former indigenous affairs minister, Robert Tickner, says imprisonment rates will remain high until there are substantial changes in health, education and housing. Pat Turner, the lead convener of the Coalition for Peaks, said Aboriginal leaders were pushing for more ambition across all categories in the Closing the Gap refresh, not only justice, including health, education, economic development and housing.

But there also needs to be a rethink on the ground in the ways of policing and punishment, and more openness by authorities for serial failures. We have reported extensively on police brutality, such as the 2004 death of Cameron Doomadgee in a Palm Island lockup. A decade later, there was the horrific case of “Miss Dhu”, who died at a remote Pilbara watch house, and the scandal of secrecy by officials. The doggedness of Paige Taylor and Michael McKenna exposed the truth behind the 22-year-old woman’s inhumane treatment and the bizarre fine-enforcement regime in Western Australia. Legislation to reduce the practice of jailing people for unpaid fines is being debated in the WA upper house this week. Indigenous disadvantage has deep roots in our society, demanding specific yet often uncomplicated approaches. We should keep the focus on these practical ways to close the gap, aim high, try new things — and not be distracted by the theatre or urgency of ephemeral rage.