Prisons are Vile

 The USA is the mother of jailers but Australia is the mother of jailers of its First Peoples – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.  Nationally one in 8 have been to prison. From a racialised lens that’s the world’s highest jailing rate, just outstripping the American jailing rate of Black Americans. One in four of the nation’s Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander males have been to prison and this will continue to be the case – in fact, it will increase by 2025 to one in three.

40 percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live below the poverty line. There are nearly 11,000 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders presently in jail. One in four of those living below the poverty line has been to prison. It’s worst in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where one in five Aboriginal people have been to prison. Nearly 100 per cent of those who have been gaoled live below the poverty line. The majority of people incarcerated are indeed inside for relative low level offending and poverty-related crimes. 

Nearly one hundred per cent of the suicides of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders are of people living below the poverty line. The suicides of Aboriginal people living above the poverty line are few and are less than the suicides of non-Aboriginal Australians living above the poverty line.

During the last five years one in 17 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths has been a suicide. However, if we disaggregate to the 40 per cent who live below the poverty line the estimated suicides accounts for one in eight deaths.

Eight of ten children in remote communities do not complete Year 12. Nearly 25 per cent of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders live remote. They are stitched big time by our governments and by government funded institutions. They are denied the equivalency of infrastructure, services and opportunity that the rest of Australia enjoys, including remote non-Aboriginal towns. Eighty-six per cent of the national prison population did not complete high school and nearly 40 per cent did not get past Year 9. 

Nearly 100 percent of the near 18,000 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children removed from their biological families lived below the poverty line. There are 300,000 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders living below the poverty line. Nearly 150,000 are children, with 18,000 having been taken away.

When it comes to deaths in custody, we know the tragic toll, but in the first year following release, all the research shows that former inmates are up to 10 times more likely to suicide, or die an unnatural death, engage in risk-taking behaviour and substance abuse – than at any time while in prison.

Academic/criminologist Don Weatherburn reported, “Between 2002 and 2016 saw substantial reductions in a number of major categories of crime in Australia, including murder, robbery, break and enter, motor vehicle theft and other theft” Dr Weatherburn continued, “One might expect the Australian imprisonment rate to have fallen too, but it did not. Over the same period, the Australian imprisonment rate grew by 36 percent.” Dr Weatherburn argues that an increase in illicit drug use underlies the aberrant behaviour leading to the increasing incarceration toll. He suggested, “…if much of the increase in imprisonment rates is due to drug use, healing centres” would be a more positive way forward.

Professor Chris Cunneen, criminologist, wrote, “Too many Indigenous Australians will remain second-class citizens in their own country – remaining the object of law when it comes to criminalisation and incarceration.”

The prison population has doubled in the last quarter century – and the filling of our prisons is comprised of the poorest and the illiterate, and of the further marginalisation of these people. The grim reality is the suicides will increase, more children taken. There will continue the transgenerational ruinous impacts on families and generations unborn.

http://thestringer.com.au/one-in-4-aboriginal-males-jailed-8-in-10-remote-living-do-not-finish-school-one-in-eight-deaths-of-the-poor-is-a-suicide-12759#.WqNa9uhubIU