On an average night in 2019, there were 949 children behind bars in Australia – more than half of them were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
Of all 10-year-olds incarcerated, 80% were Aboriginal children.
Aboriginal kids make up only 6% of all 10- to 17-year-olds in Australia but they are 54% of the juvenile detention population.
They are jailed at 22 times the rate of non-Indigenous young people. And they are jailed younger. In 2019 nearly 65% of children under 14 in detention were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.
Study after study has shown that contact with the criminal justice system at a young age can do lasting damage to children, their families and communities. […] According to a 2016 report by the Sentencing Advisory Council, 94% of children in detention aged 10 to 12 returned to prison before they were 18. […]
Aboriginal children are also disproportionately targeted by punitive policing. In New South Wales, for example, Indigenous kids are significantly overrepresented in the number of strip-searches conducted by police.
NSW police have also been operating a secretive blacklist known as the suspect target management plan, or STMP, largely made up of Indigenous children – 72% – deemed to be at risk of committing crimes. The NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission found that many of the children, some as young as nine, had not been charged with a crime and were not aware they were a target.
Between 2017 and 2019 the state’s highest concentration of kids subject to the STMP were in the western Sydney suburb of Mount Druitt. At 13 [I.S.] was strip-searched by police on his way to the shops in the suburb. [I/S/] says he was told to strip down to his underpants on the side of a busy road. “It was embarrassing,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do so I just complied.” [I.S.] doesn’t know if he was on the STMP but says there were periods when police stopped him almost daily. One day he was stopped twice, by the same officers. The first time he was strip-searched. […]
Increasing the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 could lead to a decrease of about 15% in the number of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in detention, according to the 2020 Productivity Commission report […]. But governments – with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory’s – are reluctant to act […]. Queensland’s attorney general […] said bluntly: “There are no plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility in Queensland.” […]
All but one of the 32 kids now in juvenile detention in the NT are Aboriginal boys.
There have been numerous times over the past decade when every single child in detention in the territory is Aboriginal.
The restorative justice program is available in 12 NSW local courts. The magistrate works with Aboriginal elders, victims and the offender’s family to determine an appropriate sentence. […] Some states also have their version of the NSW youth Koori court […]. But the youth worker [D.D.] says […] “I want to stop people from ever going to court. I want to stop us focusing on having culturally safe courts, when really we need to have culturally safe communities […].” [T.W.] says therapeutic approaches are needed […].
“When do we lose our compassion for a child who is being abused or traumatized […]?” she asks. “Well, effectively Australia says we lose that compassion at [age] 10.”
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Headline and text published by: Lorena Allam and Laura Murphy-Oates. “Australia’s anguish: the Indigenous kids trapped behind bars.” Guardian Australia. 17 January 2021.
