Record number of native people behind bars in the north of Australia
In the north of Australia, the prisons protrude from a record number of prisoners. Around ninety percent of them are from Aboriginal and Street Torres descent. “The system is falling over,” says Anthony Keven, interim director of North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency or Sewing, a non-profit organization that assists indigenous people who come into contact with the judiciary.
Uit een recent onderzoek naar de positie van de inheemse bevolking in Australië blijkt dat het nergens zo slecht gaat als in het Northern territory. The report looks at health care, education, housing, child mortality, addiction and crime, but the most striking figure is that of the prison population. Almost one percent of the total population is in custody; More than ninety percent of them are of native descent.
That has to do with the hard policy of the local government led by Lia Finocchiaro of the Country Liberal Party. A year ago she came to power with the promise for ‘ law and order’ . Since then, far -reaching measures have been taken. For example, the Northern territory has the “strictest guarantee laws of the country”,
Because so many people are picked up and charged, it sometimes takes months before their case is dealt with. A waiting period of an average of three months applies to the local court. At the Supreme Court it is even almost a year. 41 Aboriginals are imprisoned every day in the northern territory, says director Beven. “That is an increase of 123 percent since 2019. In some places there is not even enough drinking water.” The fact that the system is under pressure is clearly noticeable in the local court in Darwin. Naaja lawyers rush back and forth. “They sometimes hear only half an hour before the hearing starts who their client is,” says Beven. After a short conversation, a lawyer must already defend his client. “We always try to get people free on bail, because we know how long it can take before the case is treated in terms of content,” says Geven. Usually that doesn’t work. More than fifty percent of prisoners in the northern territory are in custody and has therefore not been convicted. That puts pressure on an important principle of legal principle: “Everyone has the right to be treated as innocent, until the opposite has been proven. But that no longer applies if people are locked up for up to a year without conviction.” Life in the overcrowded prisons is heavy, says Renae Bretherton, or Rocket as she is called. She belongs to the West-Australian native Noongar-Stam. As a small -scale drug dealer, she was regularly in prison for years. In the meantime she is clean and works for the local human rights organization Justice Reform Initiative who is committed to the rights of the indigenous population. “It is so busy that people on mattresses on the floor should be side by side. Sometimes they can’t shower for days. They hardly come out,” she sums up. The repeat rate does not lie: six of the ten prisoners end behind bars within two years of their release. “The locking of people does not help,” says 42-year-old Rocket. “Otherwise, the Northern Territory would be the safest place in Australia?” Trembling states that the government has no eye for the underlying causes. According to him, that is very clear: “A large number of people in the northern territory are abandoned. They have to deal with extreme poverty, poor housing, health problems, addiction. Something has to be done about that.” And there is more to play, says Rocket. “The fact that so many Aboriginals are stuck, proves to me that we have a systematic racist system.” And not only adults end up behind bars, also many children. The local government recently reduced the age at which children can be held legally responsible from twelve to ten years. According to Rocket, locking up children has the opposite effect. “The younger they are when they come into contact with the judiciary, the greater the chance that they are stuck in that system for the rest of their lives. That is not fair. Our children deserve better,” says Months waiting
locked up without conviction
Children from 10