You don't need me to tell you that in a country such as America, with
all its history of racial conflict, the rate of imprisonment for
African-Americans is far higher than the rate for whites. Twelve times
higher, in fact. But you may need me to tell you we make the Yanks look
good. Our rate of indigenous imprisonment is 18 times that for the rest
of us.
Aborigines make up 2.5 per cent of the Australian adult
population, but account for 26 per cent of all adult Australian
prisoners.
If you want me to give you some economic reasons we
should care about this, it's not hard. On average it costs $275 a day to
keep an adult in jail. So it's costing taxpayers about $800 million a
year just to keep that many Aborigines in prison. And this takes no
account of the cost of juvenile detention centres, police costs in
responding to offending, the cost of investigating and prosecuting
suspected offenders and the health costs in responding to and treating
victims.
Obviously, for every Aborigine who was in a job and
paying tax rather than in jail and costing money, there'd be a double
benefit to taxpayers, as well as a gain to the economy.
But the far more
important reason for caring about the high rate of indigenous
imprisonment is moral. As the criminologist Dr Don Weatherburn argues in
his new book Arresting Incarceration, the consequences of European
settlement have been truly calamitous for Aboriginal Australians.
"The
harm might not have always been deliberate and it may not have been
inflicted by anyone alive today, but it is no less real for that,"
Weatherburn says. "An apology for past wrongs would be meaningless
without a determined attempt to remedy the damage done."
The
trouble is, particularly in the case of Aboriginal imprisonment, we've
been making such an attempt, but getting nowhere. If not before, the
problem was brought to our attention by the 1991 findings of the Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
The commission found
that Aborigines were no more likely to die in jail than other prisoners.
The reason so many died was that they constituted such a high
proportion of the prison population.
The Keating government
accepted all but one of the commission's recommendations and allocated
the present-day equivalent of almost $700 million to put them into
effect. State and territory governments committed themselves to a
comprehensive reform program.
But get this: rather than declining since then, the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment has got worse.
"It is hard to imagine a more spectacular policy failure," Weatherburn says.
It
would be easy to blame the problem on racism in the justice system but,
though there may be some truth in this, it's not the real reason.
Similarly, Weatherburn argues it's not good enough to blame it on
"indigenous disadvantage".
If that were the case, virtually all
Aborigines would be actively involved in crime and they aren't. Most are
never arrested or imprisoned.
The plain fact is that more Aborigines are in jail because more Aborigines commit crimes, particularly violent crimes. In
NSW, for example, the indigenous rate of arrest for assault is 12 times
higher than the non-indigenous rate. The rate of indigenous arrest for
break and enter is 17 times higher.
Measures taken after the royal
commission failed to reduce crime because they assumed this would be
achieved if indigenous Australians were "empowered". Much of the money
and effort was devoted to legal aid and land acquisition.
Weatherburn
argues that if you want to understand indigenous offending, you need to
look at the factors likely to get anyone involved in crime, regardless
of race.
"The four most important of these are poor parenting
(particularly child neglect and abuse), poor school performance,
unemployment and substance abuse," he says. "Indigenous Australians
experience far higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, child neglect and
abuse, poor school performance and unemployment than their
non-indigenous counterparts."
The first and most important thing
we need to do, he says, is reduce the level of Aboriginal drug and
alcohol abuse. This is key, not just because drug and alcohol abuse have
direct effects on violence and crime, but also because they have such a
corrosive effect on the quality of parenting children receive, which
greatly increases the children's risk of involvement in crime.
Weatherburn's
second priority is putting more resources into improving indigenous
education and training. As the mining boom in the Pilbara has shown,
it's much easier to find jobs for Aborigines when they have the degree
of education and skill employers are looking for.
His third
priority is investing in better offender rehabilitation programs.
Efforts to divert serious and repeat offenders from prison have been a
dismal failure. But small changes in the rate of indigenous return to
jail have the potential to produce large and rapid effects on the rate
of Aboriginal imprisonment.
Much existing spending on Aboriginal
affairs is ineffective. Were it not for Tony Abbott's special affinity
with Aborigines in the Top End, we could expect the coming federal
budget to really put the knife through it.
But this would save money without reducing the problem.
It
will be a great day when the advocates of smaller government abandon
the false economy of not wasting money on the routine, rigorous and
independent evaluation of the effectiveness of government spending
programs. Then we might make some progress.
