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“Australia needs to take drastic action to reverse the over-representation of Indigenous young people in juvenile detention centres or face losing another generation of first peoples to failed government policies, according to a landmark Amnesty International report.
The report, Brighter Tomorrow: Keeping Kids in the Community and out of Detention in Australia, says that rates of Indigenous youth imprisonment are the highest they have been since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody handed down its report in 1991.
The statistics paint a bleak picture. In 2013-14, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were 26 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous children.
On any given night there were 430 Indigenous children in detention in Australia, at a cost of $1,200 each. The annual cost of keeping a child in detention is $440,000 which, the report points out, is enough to put an Indigenous young person through an entire undergraduate medical degree.
According to 2012-2013 figures, one in every 28 Indigenous boys aged 10 to 17 had spent time in detention, compared to one in 544 for non-Indigenous boys. Indigenous representation among girls in detention was even higher – one in 113 Indigenous girls aged 10 to 17 had spent time in detention, compared to one in 2,439 non-Indigenous girls.”
– The Guardian, Indigenous youth imprisonment rate is highest in two decades, Amnesty says.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
