BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY -- A NATIONAL SHAME The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, February 10th, 1999. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Fax: (612) 9281 5795. Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.peg.apc.org/~guardian Subscription rates on request. ****************************** By Mati English The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (begun 1988, recommendations made public 1991) came about after years of struggle by Aboriginal people and their supporters. Now, eight years after its recommendations were made public, has the situation changed? Have its recommendations been implemented? Has the number of deaths fallen? The political landscape has changed considerably in the last ten years. Private jails are well established. Practically every state has get-tough law-and-order policies, some are pursuing mandatory sentencing. Looking back In 1988 Helen Boyle, then Chairperson of the Committee to Defend Black Rights, travelled to Geneva to bring the issue of black deaths in custody into the international arena. She addressed the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Ms Boyle told the UN Working Group: "Many people are picked up on minor legal charges, taken to police cells and within hours they are dead. "In the minority of these cases, the legal authorities have rushed to the claim before proper inquiries have been held, that the causes of these deaths have been suicide." Ms Boyle had brought damning evidence with her. There had been 31 Aboriginal deaths in custody over the previous two years, and the rate of deaths at that time in 1988 was one every 14 days. Furthermore, those figures were the ones collected by the Committee to Defend Black Rights only and it was more than likely that there were other unreported deaths in custody. The Working Group heard that racism in Australia was institutionalised by law through disproportionate representation of the Aboriginal people in custody -- 16 times the national average. The funding for her Committee was a paltry $13,000 to investigate six Aboriginal deaths in custody, gather further evidence on 81 other cases and assist the Aboriginal families with their grief and the intimidation and harassment from the authorities and racist groups once they spoke out publicly about the loss of a family member. That was the situation prior to the Royal Commission into the Black Deaths in Custody, which recommended a number of important measures to be implemented as a means to prevent deaths in custody. Today the situation in the justice system is no less a cause for concern. Vinson Report In December 1998 a report by a NSW academic, Professor Tony Vinson, was hailed as "a loud wake-up call for all governments and political parties on the use of get tough policies on crime and rising prison populations" by Colin Dillon, the ATSIC Commissioner responsible for monitoring implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission. Professor Vinson found tough-on-crime policies and an associated rise in prison population invariably increased deaths in custody. His report also found that the proportion of indigenous prisoners had increased from 5.8 per cent to 12.4 per cent of the inmate population since 1986. "This figure is a national shame and an indictment on all levels of government", said Commissioner Dillon. Mr Dillon is adamant that the figures should not be seen as either a success or a vindication of "get tough on crime" policies as preached by some governments. "What this figure represents and this report underlines is the abject failure of policy by governments", he said. Both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians suffer policy failure as far as the "purpose, practice and application of the criminal justice system" is concerned. Commissioner Dillon said that "until the machinery of government focuses on the underlining cause, the reasons why indigenous people are experiencing these massive increases in contact with prisons, the police and the courts -- these figures will continue to rise. "The deaths in custody will continue to increase -- as they have." He called on all state and federal governments to respond to Professor Vinson's Report by returning to key findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which he said had never been properly addressed. The Royal Commission stated that "... changes to the operation of the criminal justice system alone will not have a significant impact on the number of Aboriginal persons entering into custody or the number of those who die in custody." Rather, it was "the social and economic circumstances which both predispose Aboriginal people to offend and which explain why the criminal justice system focuses upon them -- which are much more significant factors". Until governments come to grips with this reality, said Mr Dillon, and respond to these fundamental issues, there can be no change -- or hope of change -- today to what is documented in Professor Vinson's report today, nor long into the next century. "This report is another highly credible expert voice with a message that is not new, but highly disturbing", said Mr Dillon. "It is disturbing because this report like almost every similar report in the last ten years shows that fiddling at the margins of the criminal justice system by governments cannot effect positive and fundamental change. "What Professor Vinson is effectively saying is that governments are still dealing with the symptoms, tinkering at the edges, and totally avoiding addressing the fundamental underlying causes." Professor Vinson compared the sentences of indigenous and non- indigenous inmates. He took into account factors such as criminal record, commission of offences of the same type, number of counts, age, court location and seriousness of the offence. He found that there were no differences in the length of custodial sentences given to indigenous and non-indigenous offenders once allowance was made for age and seriousness of the offence. Despite that apparent even-handedness in the sentences imposed by courts on indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, Aborigines were over-represented 10-fold in prison. Professor Vinson also found that, based on his sample of 4,335 male prisoners, non-indigenous inmates were more likely to have been convicted for drug offence and, to a lesser extent, sex offences, fraud and murder and that indigenous inmates were three times more likely to have been convicted for assault. He also found that, based on his sample of 266 female inmates studied, female indigenous offenders were more likely than non- indigenous females to have been sentenced for break-ins, theft, justice procedures and assault. "To reduce the number of indigenous people in jail, the most direct course would be to use prisons more judiciously, rather than take pride in a prison population which has risen by 75 per cent over the past decade", Professor Vinson said. "Such a recommendation flies in the face of current political practice, but at some stage politicians on both sides must face the reality that the more they continue on their present paths, the more assuredly the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment will continue to rise", Professor Vinson added. Recommendations Prison should be used as a sanction of last resort in keeping with the Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Recommendation 87) and the option of community-based correction orders should be increased. Governments continue to violate the Recommendations of the Royal Commission. Legislation such as "three strikes", which removes judiciary discretion in sentencing, clearly breaches the Royal Commission recommendations and results in more people in jails. NSW, with an election next month, is a prime example of electioneering based on "Law and Order", with Labor and the Coalition trying to out-muscle each other on who'll introduce the most draconian laws to incarcerate people, and keep them locked up longer. Jail overcrowding has been one of the contributing factors to the increase in deaths in custody. Building private prisons is not a solution. There is the important question of accountability and a state's legal duty of care for each individual incarcerated by the state. For a state to indulge the profit drive of private enterprise by exploiting prisoners is a dangerous development: private prisons encourage higher rates, and longer periods of, incarceration. When the Royal Commission released its recommendations, Aboriginal organisations stated that it fell short of the legitimate expectations of indigenous people. They highlighted its major shortcomings, including that the Commissioners recommended the desperately needed changes be left to state governments, which have been the main oppressors and violators of indigenous rights. At the time Aboriginal spokesman, Paul Coe, said: "I am frankly quite amazed that the Royal Commissioners, knowing that it was the State Governments who in 1984 destroyed the plan for uniform national land rights for Aboriginal people, now want us to trust these same State Governments to implement the reforms that will stop Aboriginal poverty and deaths in custody." To return the question posed at the beginning of this article: have things changed? Yes they have, for the worse. -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List As vilified, slandered and attacked by One Nation mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
