Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem?

 

Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?

Macbeth, Act one, Scene three.

 

Yesterday, I read an important and I suggest ‘must-read’ assessment of the state of carceral policy in Australia. Published in The Conversation (link here), and titled Prisons don’t create safer communities, so why is Australia spending billions on building them? The article is co-authored by a disciplinary diverse team of academics headed by Emma Russell from La Trobe University. The article summarises available data by jurisdiction and while the focus is on the mainstream, it refers in passing to Indigenous incarceration rates which have been skyrocketing across the nation.

One data point quoted stood out:

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison.

This was supplemented with an extraordinary graph titled Percentage of the Population in Adult Prison, showing the incarceration rates for each Australian jurisdiction since 1860. What jumps off the page is the stratospheric growth in incarceration rates in the NT, rising from 0.22 % in 1980 to 0.66 % in 2020, and then to 1.03% in 2025. No other jurisdiction records any such increase, though virtually all jurisdictions have recorded close to a doubling in their incarceration rates off a low base over the same period.

The ABS released data on incarceration rates on 19 December 2025 (link here). The report a national prison population of 44,403 persons on 30 June 2024. Of these, 15,871 were Indigenous. The Indigenous prison population increased by an extraordinary 2019 persons or 15% over the previous year.

The remote angle

While The Conversation article is extraordinarily valuable, it strikes me that it underplays the role that the hyper-incarceration of remote Indigenous people is playing in driving the rise in incarceration rates. The article points to changes to policy for these trends (longer prison sentences and less access to bail) and cites Andrew Leigh’s 2020 article The Second Convict Age: Explaining the Return of Mass Imprisonment in Australia in the Economic Record (link here). The abstract to Leigh’s article states, inter alia:

Fully 2.5 per cent of Indigenous adults are incarcerated (2,481 prisoners per 100,000 adults), a higher share than among African-Americans. The recent increase in the Australian prison population does not seem to be due to crime rates, which have mostly declined over the past generation. Instead, higher reporting rates, stricter policing practices, tougher sentencing laws, and more stringent bail laws appear to be the main drivers of Australia's growing prison population.

These reasons are fine as far as they go, but where are these stricter policies being applied, and why? The answers to these questions are required to find the appropriate policy responses.

My hypothesis is that the accelerating growth in incarceration rates is associated with more punitive approaches by governments to criminal behaviours in remote regions, which are themselves a response to increasing dysfunction associated with alcohol and drug abuse, and longstanding lack of investment by governments in finding substantive policy solutions. To be clear, social dysfunction is an institutional affliction impacting Indigenous communities, but its causes can be traced to the long-standing failure of governments of all persuasions to establish and maintain the institutional and economic frameworks required to ensure social cohesion is guaranteed. Intuitively, it seems clear that the causal relationship between social dysfunction and alcohol and drug abuse goes in both directions; that it they are mutually reinforcing.

In the NT, according to an NT Treasury paper (link here), in 2021, 74.6% of the NT Aboriginal population resided in remote or very remote locations. The Aboriginal population of the NT comprises around 30 % of the NT total population of just over 250,000.

Unfortunately, while the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap Information Repository / data dashboard includes a number of disaggregations in its reporting on Target 10 related to over-representation in the criminal justice system (link here), the dashboard does not record the geographical status of prisoners and/or arrests leading to imprisonment. Nor does it record any information related to the association or role of alcohol or drugs in the crimes leading to incarceration. Nor does the ABS publish this data. We are left to extrapolate pending some detailed demographic research by academic criminologists or geographers…

In an earlier post titled The drivers of stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration (link here), I spent some time discussing the recent research report by Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang titled Towards a theory of Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system (link here).

The following paragraph from the Executive summary of the Weatherburn et al paper supports my hypothesis:

The strongest risk factor is having used illicit drugs and alcohol over the preceding 12 months, which increases the marginal risk of arrest by 14 percentage points…The strongest protective factor is school completion, which reduces the risk of arrest by 7.9 percentage points….

According to the ABS (link here) the total NT prison population on 30 June 2024 was 2284. Of these, 2023, or 88.5%, were Indigenous. The extraordinary increase in NT incarceration rates is almost entirely Indigenous, and three quarter of the NT Aboriginal population reside in remote or very remote locations. It seems clear that Indigenous hyper-incarceration is predominantly a remote issue in the NT. Based on my experience of some decades, and the anecdotal media reports on social dysfunction in remote communities in WA, SA, and Qld, it seems likely that similar trends will be found to exist in these jurisdictions. The only reason they are not apparent is that the Indigenous populations of these states is proportionately much lower than in the NT.

The other gap in The Conversation article (which flows perhaps from the line of argument above) is that role of alcohol or drug abuse in driving criminal behaviour particularly in remote regions. There have been longstanding calls by Western Australian police for alcohol controls in remote regions of WA (link here), and the debate over alcohol controls in the NT has been in play for decades. I don’t propose to recapitulate the case on the damaging impacts of alcohol and the case for stronger policy action on the availability of alcohol in remote regions, but will merely point readers to some previous posts on this blog (link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; and link here).

Policy Solutions

While there is undoubtedly a case for much greater investment in developing alternatives to incarceration both in mainstream contexts and in relation to Indigenous incarceration across the whole nation as advocated by the extraordinary and energetic work of the Justice Reform Initiative (link here), reversing the dire state of social dysfunction across remote Australia is in my view the only way to address the extreme hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal people.

I am under no illusions that the political vibe nationally has taken a more punitive turn and like the authors of the Conversation article, I see this as deeply counterproductive. Reversing the cataclysm confronting remote communities will require sustained political vision and commitment, and a substantive focus on expanding and accelerating some clear policy priorities.

The policy solutions outlined by Don Weatherburn and his co-authors in their Institute of Criminology research paper referenced above were framed as follows:

Measures to reduce illicit drug and alcohol use, improve school retention and improve economic outcomes for Indigenous Australians are essential if Australia is to achieve any long term reduction in the scale of Indigenous over-representation in prison.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Yet each of these three identified actions, are themselves comprised of assemblages of complex policy measures involving legislative and/or regulatory changes, access to adequate and increased funding, and most importantly, an institutional structure that can operate at scale, and is guaranteed to be sustained over at least a decade. To take an example of a recent national priority, AUKUS, each of these elements have been provided for. Unfortunately, the operation of our day-to-day political system, especially in relation to an issue that is invariably defined as the responsibility of the states, does not normally guarantee that these essential elements are provided for. I will repeat this point: our democratic politics as usual is not working to fix this issue.

Below I set out one potential model designed to ensure progress is made in reversing the worsening crisis of Indigenous hyper-incarceration. The details are less important that its description of the level and intensity of action that would in my view be required to drive real change.

As the issue of hyper-incarceration has bedevilled the nation for decades, it is clear that new approaches and ways of operating are required. The first, and most obvious, is that the issue of Indigenous over-representation in our prisons should be made, substantively and not merely rhetorically, a national priority. To this end, the Commonwealth should step up and exercise its constitutional powers granted in the 1967 referendum to develop and drive a truly national policy framework on Indigenous incarceration.

Second, for the purposes of delivering the necessary policy and program reform initiatives to underpin the incarceration reform agenda, the Commonwealth should carve out notional jurisdiction across remote northern and remote Australia and drive a comprehensive and coordinated reconceptualisation of core service delivery across remote communities and their associated service.

A core element would be the establishment of a legislated ten-year policy framework providing for ministerial regulations to implement key reforms, and the establishment of a small five-person Commission comprised of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to develop policy and program recommendations to apply across remote Australia. The Commission should aim to work cooperatively with existing bodies (state and local governments, Commonwealth agencies, community organisations, landowners) to drive innovative reforms and to recommend policy and program changes to governments at all levels. Its recommendations should be public and would need to be agreed and implemented by governments. The Commission’s legislated powers and functions would be such as to ensure that Commonwealth agencies and states and territories alike would be required to cooperate and to respond to recommendations within three months.

Such a Commission would not be required to delve into each and every policy issue but should be statutorily required to decide which issues are most relevant to the continuation of dysfunction and to focus on identifying reform strategies for the Commonwealth to implement, hopefully in conjunction with existing service delivery institutions. Obvious areas for attention would include controls on the availability of alcohol across remote Australia; upgrades to educations systems and infrastructure, and the necessity or significant expansion of subsidised remote employment focussed on community needs such as land care, ranger programs, appropriate policing models, disability support, and community maintenance.  A key assumption of this model is that the Commonwealth should be responsible for outcomes, and for bringing the states and territories to the table.

Third, a parallel structure to the remote Commission, perhaps relying more on the National Coalition of Indigenous Peaks, should be developed for addressing the challenges of reversing Indigenous incarceration rates in regional and urban areas of the nation.

Conclusion

The extraordinary levels of Indigenous hyper-incarceration are a national disgrace and are causing untold and ongoing harm to myriad Indigenous families across the nation. There are no short-term solutions, but it is clear that the punitive approaches being pursued by jurisdictions right across the nation will not be successful in preventing recidivism and repeat offending, will be extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, will likely weaken social cohesion, and are causing permanent emotional and psychological damage to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous family members.

It is the case that the process of colonisation turned the world upside down for Indigenous people across the nation, and the people of remote Australia are generations closer to that social cataclysm.

Mainstream Australia cannot undo those social processes, and the world has moved on for all Australians. However, given the clear evidence of deep dysfunction arising from those social processes that were neither chosen nor desired by Indigenous people, and the impacts those changes inevitably imposed and continues to impose, the nation and its policy elites must be prepared to consider policy options that turn established modes of policy formulation upside down. Not to do so would amount to an extraordinary admission of national policy failure. Indigenous incarceration is just one of the impacts that arise from widespread social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia and woven through pockets of urban and regional Australia.

To allow this level of dysfunction to emerge, to grow and develop, and to persist as if it is somehow outside the nation’s field of vision is both a political failure and an indictment on the moral underpinnings of our nation.

 

24 January 2025