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

 

The ongoing attendance crisis in remote schools

 

… when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion…

King Lear, Act one, Scene two.

 

Recent media articles have pointed to a continuing decline in school attendance in remote primary schools and the secondary high schools in the Kimberley. Yet this has been an issue for decades.

A 28 June 2017 ABC news article (link here), headlined WA schools hardest hit by remote disadvantage, nationwide study finds reported on a Curtin University study which found, inter alia, that:

just 40 per cent of children in disadvantaged areas [ of WA] were attending the benchmark 15 hours of preschool per week, compared to almost 70 per cent nationally.

In July 2022, the ABC published an article (link here) with the headline WA government accused of failing at-risk Kimberley students over plans to address school truancy. The article stated inter alia that the Kimberley is in crisis, and that:

A 2019 coronial inquest had found poor school attendance to be a common factor in the deaths of the children, who died between 2012 and 2016. Two of the deaths were in Halls Creek, where truancy is chronic.

That article interviews a mother who complains about the lack of follow up by the Department in relation to an attendance plan for her son but fails to acknowledge or focus on the apparent incapacity of the parent to ensure the son attends school. While mainstream Australia largely sees parents as having an overarching responsibility for their adolescent children, it is apparent that parents from traditional backgrounds do not share this perspective. They consequently place the entire responsibility for ensuring children attend whitefella schools onto governments.

A March 2023 article (link here), headlined Kimberley student attendance drops again as 95 percent of public schools record significant falls, flags the ongoing crisis. In a box titled Key Points, the article states:

21 out of 22 public schools in the Kimberley have seen a decline in attendance over the past two years. Some schools' attendance rates have been below 50 per cent. Community leaders say the Department of Education needs to do more to engage students.

While the governments have significant responsibilities, not least because the range of likely causes go much wider than anything parents can do, it does seem clear that community leaders must have a role in finding solutions and shifting community views on the roles of parents.

A more recent article dated 6 September 2024 and headlined Fewer than half of students in WA’s Kimberely attend secondary school (link here). The key points box states:

In short: Newly-released statistics show primary and secondary school attendance rates dropped significantly in the Kimberley for 2023. Secondary school attendance was 41.6 per cent, while primary school attendance was 62 per cent.

What's next? The Kimberley region's education chief concedes school attendance is "an ongoing challenge".

It seems clear that there is has been a long-standing crisis in school attendance in remote communities in the Kimberely and WA, and there is strong evidence that these issues also have traction on other remote settings, including the NT and South Australia (link here).

Having identified the attendance problem as one particularly prevalent in remote settings, there is a need for caution insofar as there is increasing evidence of an anxiety epidemic amongst young people correlated strongly with the ubiquity of social media. A recent article in the UK Guardian (link here) addresses the issue of school attendance (without ascribing causes beyond peer bullying) and argues against any policy moves to exercise punitive measures on parents or children. The article cites the following official data for a recent week of schooling across the UK (link here):

The attendance rate (proportion of possible sessions attended) was 89.8% across all schools in the week commencing 15 July 2024. The absence rate was, therefore, 10.2% across all schools…

… Across the academic year 2023/24, 20.7% of pupil enrolments missed 10% or more of their possible sessions and are therefore identified as persistently absent.

This suggests that whatever the causes and contributors to low remote community school attendance rates, there may also be much deeper systemic issues in play with a global reach and impact. As an aside, the access to live data in the UK is virtually unknown in Australian contexts. We shouldn’t think that we always do better than the poms!

The consequences of limited education for individuals are dire and include severely constrained life opportunities especially in more modern and cross-cultural contexts, reduced lifetime earnings, and predispositions to alcohol and drug abuse, and perhaps domestic violence and criminal offending. While tragic for individuals, there are macro impacts on the wider Aboriginal communities where school attendance issues are entrenched, and broader impacts on communities affected by youth violence. These impacts are beginning to seep into the larger towns and cities adjacent to remote Australia and thus the consequences of poor school attendance are structurally and systemically both economically significant and politically challenging for the relevant state and territory governments.

These outcomes are not a surprise to me ( I have been warning of the consequences of policy neglect across remote Australia since at least 2007 when with Neil Westbury we published our book Beyond Humbug (link here). Those warnings were largely not heeded by governments, and the result is that we now confront a widespread and worsening catastrophe across remote Australia (link here). Notwithstanding some welcome additional funding for remote housing in the NT, the outstanding needs across remote Australia continue to outweigh the efforts of governments (link here). The appalling unemployment situation across remote Australia and the Commonwealth Government’s entirely inadequate response raises for individuals the unanswerable question: what is the point of an education if the future involves a working lifetime spent on social security arising from the structurally determined absence of employment opportunities -see the comments on CDP reform in this recent post (link here).  

The policy vacuum in relation to remote Australia has become endemic, deep-seated and is long-standing. The political implications are clear: the recent NT election rout for the NT ALP, notwithstanding its strong focus on law and order and advocacy of more punitive policies, are an obvious outcome. Nothing proposed by either party in the NT would have or will come close to addressing the deep systemic issues in play. In short, neither side of politics in the NT is offering a solution. And yet, the Commonwealth too has vacated the policy arena.

What is required?

I will keep this brief. In relation to remote attendance, there is a need for the Commonwealth to step up and acknowledge it for the national crisis it is. There will be a need first and foremost to acknowledge the crisis and devise a robust and proactive strategy that goes well beyond the local band-aids that have been the unthinking default approach to date (and yes I am referring to the current Federal Government’s response to the Alice Springs situation).

The Commonwealth should work with the states cooperatively on these issues, but devise incentive-based payments to the states and territories rather than indulging in the politically driven negotiation that currently predominate. Robust support to Indigenous community leaders aimed at encouraging and assisting them to raise expectations of parental involvement within their communities are essential. But so too are getting financial resource allocations for schools better targeted, and if necessary increased. Rewarding effective teachers much better and ensuring that the curriculum is focussed on the needs of the least capable cohort of students are both — to use a colloquial expression — ‘no brainers’. This suggests that the adoption of curriculum methodologies (such as Direct Learning) that do not allow any student to fall behind must be a priority.

The bottom line is that there must be a quantum leap in the levels of governmental concern and policy engagement. There may well be a case too for a return to the use of proactive truancy officers designed to ensure no child can avoid attending without a truancy officer engaging with the child and his/her parental guardians though I am not advocating a punitive policy approach.

Reforms to the education system alone in remote Australia will neither be enough nor adequate. The structural drivers of low attendance must also be addressed. While there may be some impact from the Commonwealth Government’s proposed legislation to constrain access to social media for adolescents under 16, my intuition tells me that whatever its impact in mainstream contexts, there will be a more muted impact in remote community contexts merely because of the existence of other drivers of low attendance.

Those drivers include the poor state of housing, the low levels of employment, and the all too ready access to cheap alcohol and drugs. It follows that there must be a sustained increase in investment in remote housing supply, and in adopting management approaches focussed on high quality housing asset management.

And perhaps most importantly, the government must move beyond its paltry commitment to reform of the CDP program, and substantially expand the number of jobs it is fully funding across remote Australia. The trick here will be to devise delivery models that focus on productive and culturally informed employment: caring for country; devising ways to employ community members as disability service providers in association with the NDIS and state provided foundational supports; aged care employment; employment in schools teaching languages, providing infrastructure support, and perhaps as teachers’ aides and ultimately local teachers. All these roles are real jobs often funded by government, but there has been a lack of vision to ensure that they are delivered through culturally informed organisational models.

Intuitively, an expansion of housing investment and infrastructure across remote communities and of socially valuable employment will have a constraining impact on anti-social behaviour such as drug and alcohol abuse, which in turn are prime drivers of the sorts of behaviours that lead to incarceration and community violence. Governments should also focus attention on regulating and controlling the supply of drugs and alcohol in remote communities and regional centres.

The experience of the last decade has been that neither the ALP nor the LNP at a federal level have the political will nor the policy vision to deliver on such an admittedly ambitious agenda. However, there is increasing talk of a minority government scenario post the forthcoming election, and it seems likely that whatever the outcome the Teals and Independents will have greater influence. They are well placed to drive such a policy agenda if only they have the vision and energy to take on what will inevitably be a challenging, but nationally significant reform agenda.

The absence of any policy discussion regarding such an agenda, and the absence of the agenda itself, reflect the lack of a national vision amongst our political elites. They are also the source of ongoing economic and social costs imposed directly on First Nations remote communities, but inexorably leaking across to mainstream fiscal contexts. These social and financial costs represent a substantial (and presently underappreciated) risk to our aspirations to be a cohesive, inclusive and socially mature nation.

 

10 September 2024

Rebuilding Employment Services in Indigenous Australia: it’s time for action

Strong reasons make strong actions

History of King John, Act Three, Scene Four.

 

A major Parliamentary report, titled Rebuilding Employment Services, was tabled in Parliament last week. The report was produced by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services. This media release (link here) by the Committee Chair offers a good high level summary of the thrust of the report. The full report (link here) provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the employment services sector, and represents the most fundamental review of the sector in some decades. An article in The Conversation also provides a high level overview (link here)

 

I don’t propose to offer a detailed summary or critique of the report as I do not feel qualified to comment on the detail. I would however note that the employment services sector is crucially important for First Nations people given their over-representation in the most disadvantaged cohorts of Australian society, and their extremely low employment status as can be seen by a quick look at the data for target 8 in the Closing the Gap dashboard (link here). In 2021, only 55 percent of First Nations people nationally were in employment, compared to 77 percent of the mainstream community.

 

The Committee makes the point at various points in its report that the Community Development Program (CDP) which operates across remote Australia was not part of the remit for this review, albeit there are clearly numerous cross over issues, not least the underlying principles that the new report is advocating in terms of the use of punitive sanctions and reliance on work for dole. The Government has spent the last year ‘consulting’ about a new remote jobs program, with very little substantive progress (link here). Given the crucial importance of employment to overall wellbeing, and the sorry state of remote Australia as documented in numerous posts on this blog (eg link here), it strikes me that the Government’s apparent decision to opt for a ‘go slow’ implementation approach is both self-serving and difficult to justify.  

 

Reading though the report, I thought there were three issues worth pointing for their relevance to Indigenous policy.

 

The first is recommendation 31:

Para. 9.122   The Committee recommends that the Australian Government:

•         review the boundaries of Community Development Program (CDP) regions with a view to incorporating clearly urban areas (such as the southern area of Darwin) into mainstream employment services while allowing a ‘buffer’ or ‘overlap’ zone where people can choose to be allocated to CDP or mainstream services; and

•         simplify the process for jobseekers who move regularly between remote and non-remote regions and give consideration to allowing a person to nominate one program through which they will be primarily serviced and stay attached to that service.

 

This strikes me as a reasonable recommendation, but a second order issue. Given the lack of progress to date of the reform of CDPO, it will likely be years before the issues raised here are addressed, not least because the parliamentary committee listed the recommendation for implementation in the medium term (Table 16.1).

 

The second issue is recommendation 49:

Para. 13.145 The Committee recommends that the Australian Government co-design and trial a ‘Work in the Community’ community employment program in a limited number of regional areas and places with entrenched disadvantage, including the following key elements:

•         Voluntary participation and choice of placement.

•         Projects that contribute to community development, identified based on mapping of community need.

•         Jobs of varying duration and intensity with appropriate payment.

•         Work-like experiences with skills development and in-work training.

•         Success be defined around improvements in capability, health, mental health, connectedness, self-esteem, skills, and confidence rather than expecting entry into open employment in the first instance though open labour market pathways should be actively encouraged and facilitated.

The Australian Government should also consider providing a right of return to the program to give clients confidence and security to pursue open employment.

 

The discussion of this proposal can be found at paras. 13.136 to 13.145 in the report. Notwithstanding its tentative tone, the recommendation is in my view of huge potential significance. Whether it is picked up in urban and regional Australia is perhaps neither here nor there, but if it were to be applied in a much more wholesale manner across the CDP region (in essence remote Australia) where there is a structural shortage of job opportunities that makes the whole ’jobseeker’ model a nonsense, it would be a game changer. There is of course a need for more detailed work to be done to develop such an approach for remote Australia, to cost it out and to engage with relevant stakeholders. A proactive Minister and Government with real concern for improving Indigenous social and economic outcomes would grasp this recommendation and run with it. Obvious steps a Minister might take would be to task the NIAA to develop a policy paper fleshing out such a community employment program, its costs, an implementation strategy an assessing the risks and opportunities that might arise were it to be progressed. Such a paper might be produced within two months and fed into the May 2024 budget considerations.

 

The third issue worth noting is recommendation 68:

15.129          The Committee recommends that as a priority, even before a new commissioning model is fully developed and implemented, the Australian Government prioritise the recommissioning of First Nations specialist services in areas with high populations of First Nations jobseekers and jobseekers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Priority should be given to commissioning Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations.

 

The discussion underpinning this recommendation can be found in paras 15.114 -15.116. I wholly endorse this recommendation. The point I wish to make however is to note how this is a good example of a parliamentary committee adopting and taking seriously Priority Reform 2: Building the Community Sector set out in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The National Agreement is in my view the cornerstone of future Indigenous policy reforms in Australia and despite its shortcomings, it is encouraging to see its existence being implicitly recognised in the Committee’s work The Committee indicates that this recommendation should be implemented int eh medium term (Table 16.1). I suggest however that there is a need for more urgency, for the NIAA to map out an implementation plan in the short-term identifying the constraints and opportunities to moving more quickly and moving ahead. Whatever occurs in the mainstream program must also be implemented in the CDP operating in remote Australia.

 

Finally, given the significance of the issues dealt with in this report for Indigenous Australians, it is to be hoped that the Minister for Indigenous Australians and NIAA take a strong and proactive interest in pushing for the implementation of these reforms sooner rather than later. This is not a matter that should be left to the Employment portfolio alone.

 

Given the extended period of policy inaction that coincided with the national debate on the Uluru Statement and the proposed Voice, it strikes me that the obvious way to shift mindsets and rebuild trust is to push ahead with positive policy reforms that benefit Indigenous people across the board. The recommendations highlighted in this post are an obvious place to start.

 

 

1 December 2023