Indigenous Australian arrest rates: Economic and social factors underlying the incidence and number of arrests

Abstract

The over-representation of Indigenous Australians in prison continues to be a serious problem, even a decade after the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were handed down. The greatest leverage for reducing Indigenous imprisonment rates appears to lie in reducing the rate at which Indigenous persons appear in court rather than in reducing the rate at which convicted offenders are sentenced to imprisonment. This would mean not only diverting Indigenous defendants away from court, but reducing the rate at which Indigenous persons are arrested, through using alternatives to arrest, reducing the rate at which they offend or re-offend and addressing inappropriate differential treatment of Indigenous persons by the criminal justice system. A unique opportunity to analyse the processes underlying Indigenous arrest is provided by the 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS) data, with its unprecedented range of socioeconomic and cultural data. This report documents the factors associated with Indigenous arrest, rather than directly analysing the nature of offence (re-offence) or differential treatment by the police.