Page 55 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 12 February 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders—incarceration rates
MR MILLIGAN: My question is to the minister for corrections. I refer to the ABS publication Prisoners in Australia 2018. It shows that the ACT has the highest ratio of Indigenous people in prison in Australia. The ACT had the highest increase in relative imprisonment of Aboriginals between 2008 and 2018. The rate of prior imprisonment or recidivism rate of Aboriginal prisoners currently in the AMC is 90 per cent, the highest in Australia. Why does the ACT have the highest ratio of Indigenous people in prison in Australia?
MR RATTENBURY: That is a deeply concerning statistic for which there is no simple answer. We do see an increasing rate of Indigenous incarceration in the ACT and I think that if we go through some of the statistics that Mr Milligan has just cited and pick each of them apart they point to a range of things. For example, the fact that 90 per cent of people have offended before speaks to the fact that in the ACT people do not get sent to jail on their first offence. And there are significant efforts to keep people out of custody. But those who do go into custody tend to come back repeatedly.
This points to the need for a new approach to justice. We need to be focusing more on justice reinvestment, and that is what the policy direction is that the government has been developing in recent years. Examples of this are the Yarrabi Bamirr program in partnership with Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services. This was a program that was started recently as a trial and was targeted at working with families to seek to proactively and preventatively avoid people going into custody.
Partnerships with the Aboriginal Legal Service around bail support are similarly targeted at keeping Indigenous people out of custody, seeking to provide culturally appropriate bail support so that Indigenous people can both get bail in the first place and then succeed while they are on bail and not be subject to justice procedure offences under the criminal justice system.
Nonetheless, that trend is one that is of great concern and I think that it does require further work. It is an area that the government is particularly focused on and I will be elaborating some further policy ideas in the near future.
MR MILLIGAN: Why does the ACT have the highest rate of recidivism for Indigenous people in Australia?
MR RATTENBURY: There is no singular understood reason for that amongst academics, criminologists, people who work in the justice system and the like. What it does point to is that there are some people who, for a range of reasons—and you can point to the considerable disadvantage that some members of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community face—continue to be involved in the justice system. The success of programs like Yarrabi Bamirr underlines the fact that there is not a singular answer to this. It requires a whole-of-systems response.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video