Having lived for many years in the Northern Territory I have been concerned with the dramatically high crime rate and intrigued by the incarceration statistics in the Northern Territory. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics: 'The Territory's prison population has grown steadily over the last 20 years ... The Northern Territory has by far the highest incarceration rate in the country, at more than four times the national average and increasing faster than any other jurisdiction'. The rate of imprisonment in 2012 increased 1 per cent over the 2011 figure.
In other words we have a flood, and it's rising!
The year 11 legal studies text book I used to teach from suggested there are two principal functions of sentencing in the criminal court: to punish the offender, and to deter both the individual and the general public from similar acts in the future. That is, to make for a safer society.
The Northern Territory Government has legislated to direct magistrates and judges in sentencing to enforce harsher penalties to ensure that the message gets out to would be offenders that if they offend they will get the full treatment. They will go to jail and for a lengthy period. So why is the situation deteriorating?
The Law Society of the NT suggests a number of reasons, including:
erosion of judicial discretion and growth of mandatory minimum sentences; failure to offer effective rehabilitation; failure to establish alternatives to incarceration; increasing number of offences; increasing police numbers; demographic change: the Northern Territory has the youngest population of any Australian jurisdiction, with an ever-increasing cohort of people becoming old enough to commit offences; criminogenic conditions: a substantial portion of the Northern Territory population live in remote communities and town camps in a state of chronic poverty, with poor housing, health, employment and education.
The very nature of Northern Territory society — widely dispersed, with small populations living in tiny communities far from a range of essential services; experiencing a severe lack of employment and educational opportunity; and living in poorly constructed and inadequately maintained housing — has produced a marginalised population with little else to do but break the law. These are the forces pushing Aboriginal young men into incarceration.
The case of Liam Jurrah, celebrated AFL footballer, is instructive. At age 23 Jurrah had established a promising career. But in March 2012 he was charged with attempted murder in Alice Springs. After being acquitted of that crime he was arrested for excessive drink driving (0.27 per cent) in Adelaide in January 2013. Soon after, in March 2013, he was convicted of assault in Alice Springs and sentenced to six months jail.
A biography written before these events, investigating Jurrah's transition to the AFL from a remote community at Yuendumu 250km north west of Alice Springs, is almost prophetic. Its author Bruce Hearn MacKinnon writes that 'mainstream society do not understand the general days' happenings in the remote areas of Alice Springs ... It's almost a war zone up there, these sorts of incidents are happening almost on an hourly basis day in day out.'
MacKinnon later concluded, during an interview after the conviction, that Jurrah has 'got to take some responsibility of his own actions and his own life. I'm not excusing him, but he's a victim at the same time of the sad circumstances of his community and Aboriginal people.'
Jurrah has significant resources at his disposal and good people to support him, yet he has come terribly unstuck. Consider the fate of so many of his relations. They are embedded in the institutions of non-Indigenous society. MacKinnon is right; each individual must take responsibility for their own behaviour. But so must the larger society and its institutions take responsibility to amend, repair and improve the lives of these victims of dispossession.
Instead we hear citizens call for increased police numbers because they feel unsafe. The increased police presence causes more arrests, more court appearances and more mandatory convictions. More young men go to jail. Then the government must at great cost build more prisons in Darwin and Alice, failing in the meantime to employ effective alternatives to incarceration. One of the consequences of this is the further marginalisation of prisoners, who are now cut off — in some cases by thousands of kilometres — from visits from wives, children and family.
And as the statistics show, each year it gets worse.
The prison system may well be achieving its first objective — to punish (hurt) the offender; I can't think of many ways to more seriously harm or hurt an Indigenous offender than to remove him from his country and kin for long periods of time. But on the count of deterrence and rehabilitation, the system is failing terribly. And it is possibly a result of the harm associated with imprisonment that the rehabilitation or correction element fails so significantly. The push factors are overcoming the deterrent effect.
Jurrah had his prison sentence reduced to three months. Hopefully in that short time he will not be too harmed by his experience. He will soon be free and hopefully will be given the chance to recommence his football career. But even if this happens the conditions confronting his cousins and brothers will not change.
So the prisons keep on filling — and none of us is safer.
Mike Bowden has a Master of Aboriginal Education at Northern Territory University. He was founding coordinator of the Ntyarlke Unit at the Catholic high school in Alice Springs in 1988. From 1993 to 2001 he was manager of community development at Tangentyere Council. In 2005 and 2006 he was acting principal at Ngukurr School and Minyerri School in the Roper River district of the Top End.