Julie Tongs OAM, CEO of Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services, has called for a Royal Commission into Indigenous disadvantage in the ACT, following a report on the ongoing over-incarceration of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT prison.
The Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services (RoGS) today showed that, while the average daily number of prisoners in the AMC had gone down:
• Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people make up less than 2 per cent of the general population in the ACT, but 24.4 per cent of the population in the AMC;
• Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people are imprisoned at 19 times the rate of non-Indigenous people, well above the national average ratio of 16;
• Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people are subject to community corrections orders at 12 times the rate of non-Indigenous people, and have a much lower completion rate of 69 per cent compared with 78 per cent.
“It’s clear that whatever the ACT Government is doing to address Aboriginal incarceration rates in Canberra is not working,” Ms Tongs said.
“We need to examine the myriad and complex factors that have led to these appalling outcomes for Aboriginal peoples in the ACT, including a lack of housing, a lack of access to specialist and mental health services, and high rates of children in out-of-home care. This is not just a problem in our prison, but across the whole community.
“We need a whole-of-government response that takes our voices and our pain seriously.”
Dr Emma Campbell, CEO of the ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS), was also deeply concerned.
“The scale of this problem is enormous,” she said. “The proportion of prisoners who are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the ACT has doubled over the last 10 years. We need to urgently address this problem by investing in community-controlled organisations for health, housing, drug and alcohol treatment services and justice.
The ACT has Australia’s highest rate of recidivism for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people: 91 per cent of detainees were imprisoned previously.
“By not addressing the systemic causes of over-incarceration, we are setting people up to fail over and over again,” Dr Campbell said.
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