YOUNG AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL PRISONERS DEEMED NATIONAL CRISIS
CANBERRA, Australia - Twenty years ago, a major government inquiry into Aboriginal suicides and suspicious deaths in prisons made more than 300 recommendations aimed at keeping more Aborigines out of jail. But in the past decade alone, the imprisonment rate for Aborigines has soared 66 per cent, the report said.
Now a days, the Australia's burgeoning population of young Aboriginal prisoners is a "national crisis" that needs urgent and wide-ranging government action, a parliamentary report warned Monday.- Aboriginal children are 28 times more likely than other Australian children to be sent to a juvenile detention center, the report on indigenous youth in the criminal justice system found.
The report comes as the government strives to close the life expectancy gap of more than a decade between Aborigines and other Australians by addressing poor health, unemployment, low education levels as well as alcohol and drug abuse among indigenous people.- The government has also cracked down on rampant child sexual abuse in Outback Aboriginal communities in recent years by banning alcohol and pornography and by restricting what Aborigines' welfare cheques can buy.
While Aborigines make up an impoverished minority of only 2.5 per cent of Australia's 22 million population, 25 per cent of the Australian prison population is indigenous. Incarceration rates are far worse for the young, with Aboriginal children accounting for 59 per cent of inmates in Australian juvenile detention centres. "The over-representation of indigenous youth in the criminal justice system is a national crisis," the report said.
"This is a national tragedy, and questions must be raised as to why the situation has worsened so dramatically after the sweeping reforms recommended" by the inquiry in 1991, the report said.The 346-page report released yesterday made 40 wide-ranging recommendations that attack many underlying causes for young indigenous Australians getting in trouble with police.
AUSTRALIA ABORIGINAL YOUTHS 28 TIMES MORE TO END UP IN JAIL
Sydney – The death of several Australian Aborigines who have died in prison or police custody around the country recently has underscored the disproportionately high percentage of Aborigines among the country’s incarcerated – a result in part of overcrowded housing and low education rates that go hand in hand with violence and petty crime. But discrimination is also to blame, say critics.
Sporce: Yahoo News
- The picture is especially bleak for young indigenous people, who are 28 times more likely to end up in juvenile detention according to the latest official figures. In one notorious case last November, police charged a 12-year-old boy in Western Australia with receiving a chocolate frog allegedly stolen from a supermarket.
- Aboriginal adults are six times more likely to be arrested than other Australians and 13 times more likely to be jailed. In the Northern Territory, they make up 80 percent of the prison population although only one-third of the territory’s residents are indigenous.
- Arrested for drunkenness, Doomadgee dies in jailA young man named Mulrunji Doomadgee, of Palm Island off Queensland’s coast, was one such Australian Aborigine who was caught up in the criminal justice system. Arrested for drunkenness and swearing, he was found dead in a cell after a struggle with the policeman who had brought him in, Chris Hurley.
- Critics say Doomadgee’s offense is precisely the type that does not warrant automatic arrest and imprisonment.
- “The initial apprehension and locking up of Mulrunji Doomadgee were as much an issue as what happened afterwards,” says Chris Cunneen, a law professor at the University of New South Wales. “They showed how police are far too ready to arrest and take aboriginal people into custody in situations where there would be alternatives available.”
AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES ASK U.N FOR REFUGEE STATUS ?
A group of Australian Aborigines asked the United Nations Wednesday for refugee status, claiming special emergency laws to curb alcohol and sexual abuse in the remote outback have turned them into outcasts at home.
Source; Reuters
- Richard Downs, a spokesperson for the 4,000-strong Alyawarra people in central Australia, said the request was given to James Anaya, the United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous human rights, during a fact-finding tour to Australia.
- Australia’s 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 per cent of the population. They suffer higher rates of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence, and have a life expectancy 17 years shorter than other Australians.
- The intervention, launched by the former conservative government in June 2007 to stamp out widespread child sex abuse, fuelled by chronic alcoholism from “rivers of grog” in indigenous communities, had taken away indigenous rights, Downs said.
- An independent review last year found the intervention affected 45,500 Aboriginal men, women and children in more than 500 Northern Territory communities, and progress on health care and security were undermined by a lack of full community support.
- Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made indigenous affairs a priority of his government, winning praise for apologising in parliament for historic injustices against Aborigines.
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