Looking out: Stop these tragic deaths

Stop these tragic deaths

“Aboriginal inmates have been victimised, intimidated and ... abused. [Their] ... basic human rights have been defiled and are being defiled on a daily basis.” — Green Left Weekly

An Aboriginal prisoner, Kerry Jones, had to go on a 27-day hunger strike just to get the attention of the administrator who runs the Goulburn Jail. Jones, and other prisoners like him, seek only humane treatment. Why is that so hard for Australian prison administrators and officers to understand?

The frightening number of Aboriginal deaths in Australia's prison system should be getting a lot more attention. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, though very well intended, was at best a lackadaisical response to a life and death situation.

Moreover, when you consider that fewer than a million Aborigines are left in Australia, along with the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the number of Aborigines being hauled off to prison daily, a less than subtle pattern emerges of what could easily be called administrative genocide.

It appears to many, myself included, that the Australian government is dragging its feet. The royal commission placed special emphasis on educational programs that would clarify Aboriginal custom and culture for prison officers. Unfortunately, only a few of these educational initiatives have gone beyond the drawing board. Professor Jeffrey von Arx is the director of Georgetown University's Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies (in Washington, DC). Perhaps he can shed some light on this matter.

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In 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made recommendations for alleviating the disproportionate number of Aboriginal deaths in prison, youth remands and police custody. Some of these recommendations have been implemented, and yet the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody has increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of overall deaths in custody.

Amnesty International, in a report issued in June 1997, criticised governments at the federal, state and territorial level for failing to implement many of the commission's recommendations, and so permitting a situation to develop in which “ill-treatment, or lack of care amounting to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment may have [in some cases] contributed to a death in custody”.

Last July, a ministerial summit of state and federal officials and representatives of Aboriginal peoples met in Canberra to address the problem and agreed on a number of new policy initiatives.

Why have the recommendations been so slow in implementation? As always when addressing a complex social and cultural problem, there is not a single answer.

The high incidence of police contact with Aborigines, especially with youth, over minor infractions, raised in the Amnesty report the question of police targeting of Aborigines. These encounters have too often resulted in the death or injury of Aboriginal youth, or begun a vicious cycle of involvement with the legal system that is a contributing factor to the disproportionate incarceration of Aborigines.

Once in custody or prison, Amnesty International has stated, proper care has too often not been exercised by those with responsibility for the welfare of prisoners. At times, this has been a consequence of indifference, ignorance or neglect; at other times, the problems have been structural: how, for example, to deal with custody of Aborigines in isolated and understaffed police stations when 24-hour supervision is difficult to achieve?

Both the Amnesty report and the ministerial summit emphasised the need to remedy underlying causes. The summit committed itself to coordination of funding and service delivery for indigenous programs and services to deal with social and economic factors like unemployment, inferior education and housing, and inadequate health, in the belief that they are at the root of many encounters between Aborigines and the police.

In the end, the solution must be a cultural one. One of the most important ways of dealing with the terrible problem of Aboriginal deaths in custody would be to return to Aborigines, as much as possible — and certainly in the case of minor offences — control over adjudication and punishment in their own communities.

Native American communities have long had the ability to deal with misdemeanours among their own people, and it would seem that Australia would do well to find ways of empowering Aboriginal communities to judge and punish their own as the best way to stop these tragic deaths.

[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.] Brandon and his friends are trying to raise funds to pay for a lawyer for his appeal. If you can help, please make cheques payable to the Brandon Astor Jones Defence Account and post to 41 Neutral St, North Sydney NSW 2060, or any Commonwealth Bank, account No. 2127 1003 7638.]