Ken Wyatt’s call to break cycle, keep Indigenous kids out of jail

Ken Wyatt has pushed the federal government to increase the number of young Indigenous offenders diverted from detention to break a tragic cycle of incarceration.

Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt. Picture: Gary Ramage

Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt says he would “rather see energy that is being used in a negative way being used for something constructive” as he pushed the federal government to increase the number of young Indigenous offenders diverted from detention to break a tragic cycle of incarceration that too often had led to deaths in custody.

“All the evidence is there that it is better to break the cycle of ­recidivism so these kids don’t end up in adult prison,” said Mr Wyatt, who will next week ­discuss the government’s strategy to reduce the number of young Indigenous offenders who end up in detention with Attorney-General Michaelia Cash and Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews.

“We have got to look at the combination of dealing with crime but also looking at the possibility of diversion programs,” Mr Wyatt told The Weekend Australian.

“What I want to see this ­nation do is to look at the rates of incarceration and consider each individual on merit for diversion programs … they have been an effective way of keeping young people out of incarceration and ending up in that pattern of ­recidivism.”

It will be 30 next Thursday that the royal commission into black deaths in custody handed down its findings, noting a “major reason for Aboriginal deaths in custody remains: the grossly disproportionate rates at which Aboriginal people are taken into custody”.

Since then, the proportion of prisoners who are Indigenous has more than doubled. Today about 3.3 per cent of the population is ­Indigenous yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people ­comprise 29.7 per cent of people in detention, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show. In Western Australia, 3.8 per cent of all Indigenous adults are in jail.

Mr Wyatt wants the federal government to consider how it can support the expansion of proven diversionary programs and specialist jurisdictions — such as the Nunga Court, the first Aboriginal sentencing court in the country — that he says are important to steer younger ­offenders away from juvenile ­detention where they often learn skills to commit more crimes.

Some states have limited ­diversionary programs that can include formal cautions and community conferences, but all are small in scale.

In the Kimberley in the far northwest of Australia, the justice reinvestment program Olabud Doogethu has resulted in a 58 per cent fall in burglaries and a 28 per cent fall in stealing by juveniles in 11 remote communities.

The programs, and separate Indigenous courts, are controversial among some law enforcement and in the community but are ­becoming more sought after. West Australian Police Commissioner Chris Dawson in December told The Weekend Australian that he wanted Aboriginal ­communities to take responsibility for punishing and “shaming” juvenile offenders in a bid to stop them from being dragged through the criminal justice system.

Six Indigenous people died in custody in 1990, the last year of the royal commission. In the first four months of 2021, five have died in custody or during a police chase.

Patrick Dodson, one of the five commissioners at the four-year inquiry into Indigenous deaths in custody, sees the factors that lead to over incarceration of Indigenous people as a key issue for the nation to address.

Now a Labor senator, he said he was “disappointed” that the conversation remained “very narrow (in a) sense of focusing back on ­people’s deaths in custody, when I know people die from all sorts of causes when in custody; health being one”.

The latest figures from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Deaths in Custody Program show death rates of Indigenous prisoners have consistently been lower than that of non-Indigenous prisoners since 2003.

But the overwhelming number of Indigenous Australians as a proportion of people in custody has created an ongoing crisis.