By Jennifer Thompson
Last month a young Aboriginal man and former Long Bay inmate launched A Guide to Surviving Incarceration. The book relates to the feelings of many new Aboriginal inmates — "One of the first things you might think about is knocking yourself" — and outlines avenues available to help them survive.
This continuing tragedy has come under the spotlight again six years after the final report was handed down by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It made 339 recommendations to stop the horrifying number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths and $400 million was allocated to state governments to implement the recommendations. Since then, a number of reports have pointed to state and federal governments' failure to implement most of the recommendations and, as a consequence, deaths since 1991 have continued to rise.
Prior to wining government the Coalition called for a national summit on deaths in custody. This summit, to be held on May 2, was only announced after a three people died in five days in Queensland last October.
A report in November, by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission's (ATSIC) indigenous social justice commissioner Mick Dodson, put the number of deaths in custody between 1989 and January 1996 at 96. It showed that over the last seven years the number of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in prison had grown by 61% — almost twice the rate of the non-indigenous prison population — and that indigenous people were 16.5 times more likely to die in custody. In each of the deaths investigated, there were numerous breaches of the recommendations.
Keeping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People Out of Custody by Chris Cunneen and David McDonald, commissioned by ATSIC and released in February, believes a wider sociopolitical context is hindering the "fair and just treatment" of Aboriginal people by the legal system. It identifies a more punitive approach to law and order across Australia, which it says is "particularly evident in changes to sentencing law" and the treatment of public drunkenness (which hasn't yet been decriminalised in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania).
The report says that more punitive options have had "a profoundly negative impact on Aboriginal people".
Many of the commission's recommendations aimed to develop non-custodial alternatives, better and non-discriminatory use of bail and summons provisions and prison was only to be a last resort. But the trend in sentencing has been to keep people in jail longer state Cunneen and McDonald,
According to their report, the commission's recommendations on police practices and procedures "could be implemented with far greater commitment ... some currently have no more than government lip service paid to them". Aboriginal people are being "arrested, placed in police custody and in some cases imprisoned on the basis of behaviour that police find offensive and which has been precipitated by police behaviour".
The problem of "police practice" was recently been highlighted by the March 22 violent arrest of seven Aboriginal people in Ipswich, Queensland, by police whose brutality was captured by a security video camera. A report released last week by Amnesty International said that the force used by police was excessive and that their refusal to call an ambulance for a young man left convulsing, unconscious and handcuffed constituted improper care of an injured detainee. Amnesty is also concerned that the event was not an isolated incident, something inadvertently highlighted by the Queensland police commissioner's comment that "these people were ... arrested strictly in accordance" with police training.
Diversionary strategies "have been poorly implemented or not implemented at all", said the ATSIC report. It also described the high criminalisation and incarceration rates of indigenous young people as "a disastrous time bomb seriously affecting the life chances of another generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people".
In NSW the Street Safety Act, which gives police powers to move on or arrest groups of more than three people and the Police Detainment Bill, which allows police the option of detaining suspects for up to 12 hours, will mean that more Aborigines are locked up. Last October, a NSW juvenile justice department report showed that more than 33% of juvenile justice inmates were young Aboriginal people. The NSW Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee believes that this figure is likely to rapidly rise as a result of these new laws.
Preparations for the May 2 summit have been under way since February when more than 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from Aboriginal Justice Advisory Committees, Watch Committees and other community groups met for two days. However, the NSW Watch Committee has some reservations about the usefulness of the summit, to be attended by Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron and 28 state ministers and commissioners for police, corrective services, juvenile justice and justice. It has instead called for three national summits — prisons, police and the court system — to come up with practical solutions to implement the royal commission's recommendations.