Key Points
- Advocates say more support is needed to address the number of Indigenous children in youth detention.
- Indigenous people aged 10-17 are about 24 times more likely to be in detention than other young people.
- Reducing the number of Indigenous children in prison is one of the Closing the Gap targets.
The number of young people coming into contact with the criminal justice system has fallen in the past five years.
However, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children continue to be over-represented under in every state and territory, according to data released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Indigenous children aged 10 to 17 are about 24 times more likely to be in detention than other young people.
On an average day in 2021-22, almost two-thirds of people aged 10-17 in detention were Indigenous compared with almost one-third of adults in prison, the report found.
Amnesty International Australia Indigenous adviser and palawa elder Rodney Dillon said the underlying causes of poverty and inequality needed to be addressed.
"We need to have kids medically assessed before they go in or before they're even taken to court," he said.
"We're not doing that. We're just locking them up.
"And then we put them in solitary confinement and supercharge them and send them back to the community."
Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, the rate of Indigenous people aged 10 to 17 in detention fell from 33 to 28 per 10,000, while the non-Indigenous rate decreased from 1.5 to 1.2 per 10,000.
Two-thirds of all children under youth justice supervision in 2021-22 had been supervised in a previous year.
Does living in out of home care have an impact?
Arrernte/Luritja woman Catherine Liddle is the CEO of SNAICC - National Voice for our Children, the peak body that represents Indigenous children in out-of-home care.
Ms Liddle said research has consistently shown Indigenous children were more likely than other Australian children to be in out-of-home care, which is a major contributing factor to coming into contact with the criminal justice system.
"What we need to do is be putting the dollars into early intervention and looking at ways that we strengthen families so that children don't hit child protection systems, but rather have the supports that they and their families need," she said.
"We want healthy children who can stay connected to their family, to their cultures and their communities – and that's the only way to stop this type of trajectory."
Advocates say support and early intervention is needed to strengthen Indigenous families to prevent children from being taken into out-of-home care, which is a major contributing factor to coming into contact with the criminal justice system. Source: AAP / Joel Carrett
"That's always a problem when there's a knee-jerk reaction to one crime," he said.
"We need to stop crime, not glorifying it and making it worse.
"So we need to look at what's causing the crime and address those issues in each state, and those politicians that are lazy – who just want to increase the penalties.
"It's not very smart politics. It's short-term votes for a long-term problem."
On average, Indigenous children enter youth justice supervision at a younger age than non-Indigenous young people.
Ms Liddle said the most recent agreement on included a target to reduce the number of Indigenous children in detention by at least 30 per cent by 2030.
"The Closing the Gap agreement is about systemic and structural reform," she said.
"We can't keep tinkering around the edges on this.
"The reason it keeps happening is because the system was built to do it.
"The investment goes into child removals instead of early intervention.
"So until we start getting that structural reform that the overarching agreement on Closing the Gap articulates and commits all governments to, we're not going to start seeing the shift in the outcomes for our children."
