Thread by @KirstiMiller30

Either Aboriginal People are the biggest criminals on earth, genetically pre-disposed to crime, or there's something seriously wrong with our criminal justice system. As the inaugural Manager of Australia's 1st Indigenous Specific Prison, I can assure you it's the later!

https://twitter.com/kirstimiller30/status/1507599115672494081

@ScottMorrisonMP seems to think Aboriginal People should be able to forget the past, dust themselves off, accept defeat and get on with it. Except, of course, the past is ever present, both in the rate at which my people are jailed, and in the lingering effects of colonisation.

When you're dealing with segregation, oppression, high unemployment & low income, there are a lot of men and women who feel like they can't support their families.

They might become depressed, even suicidal, & look for escape in the form of gambling or drug & alcohol abuse. Violence is a by-product of that. Aboriginal People are massively over represented in unemployment rates, poverty, homelessness, & incarceration rates.

The only way we will ever make progress in closing the gaps in the core issues that affect indigenous people being justice, land rights, compensation and the appalling jailing rate Aboriginal People.

Australia cannot afford the social, health and economic costs of over-imprisonment of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Australians. It's not rocket science strong, healthy & connected communities are the most effective way to prevent crime & make communities safer.

In Australia,life expectancy for men is 79yrs.Unless you are from Wilcannia in far western NSW, where life expectancy for men is 36.7 yrs & women 42.5 yrs.

Wilcannia personifies govt funding priorities across 🇦🇺 that have effectively criminalised the consequences of marginalisation &failed to address the causes of offending. This is why our prisons presently warehouse Aboriginal men, women and children as well as the mentally ill.

The 1987–91 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported that: “The single significant contributing factor to incarceration is the disadvantaged and unequal position of Aboriginal people in Australian society in every way”.

Governments continue to lavish resources on incarceration despite empirical research that re-offending is better addressed by rehabilitation programs, education and vocational training, stable housing, and employment.

Instead of having people in communities like Wilcannia struggling below the poverty line doing WFD activities by training & employing these people as age & disability carers, trades etc it would kill many birds with the one stone.

We have to break the cycle of poverty, unemployment and incarceration they are all linked to disadvantage. The more disadvantaged the more crime, the more people locked up it’s the revolving door syndrome.

Australia, like our US and British nuclear submarine cousins, is fond of locking people up. Australia has returned to mass incarceration we now incarcerate a greater share of the adult population than at any point since the late 19th century the convict days.

The record increase in the Australian prison population does not seem to be due to crime rates, which have mostly declined over the past generation.

Instead, higher reporting rates, stricter policing practices, tougher sentencing laws, and more stringent bail laws appear to be the main drivers of Australia’s growing prison population.

The solutions to reduce imprisonment & close the gap will never be found in any of the prisons I managed or any private or public prison. The solutions need to be community-designed and driven, with government support.

The very idea of private prisons elicits an intuitive recoil in many because it involves basically making a profit out of people’s misery. Aust has blindly followed the trend in the Usa & the UK with privatised prisons.

As elsewhere, they are managed under contract with the governments that own the prisons.

The companies operating in Australia are the same global behemoths providing their services in the US and UK, in what is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Private prisons currently operate in five jurisdictions in Australia: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia.

The incentives of private prison companies can easily become opposed to the aims of the humane containment &rehabilitation of prisoners the very purposes of corrective services.

The larger the prison population, the longer the sentences, the larger the payout under government contracts; the more prisoners, the more prisons, the more growth.

Cheaper facilities and fewer services mean more profit. These inescapable relationships are the source of the potential conflict of interest,a choice between the objectives of corrective services to provide asafe, secure & humane custodial envirprovide & program interventions

to reduce the risk of reoffending & those of a maximum profit & growth.

The highest two spenders on prisons are the ACT and Tasmania, which have no private prisons. Next is Victoria, which has the most private prisons, while the cheapest is the Northern Territory, which has no private prisons.

Clearly, there is no necessary relationship between privatisation of prisons and taxpayer savings.

Why are governments outsourcing the management of Australian prisons to companies from the Usa and the UK. If there are to be private prisons government contracts must first be offered to Australian companies, shouldn’t they?

Those interested in ensuring human rights are universal and unconditional also have a reason to oppose private prisons as long as they fail to make information about their operations accessible. For the time being, murkiness remains the defining feature of private prisons.

Through the haze, it is hard to see the future prospects of private prisons in Australia. However, given the lack of savings in the most privatised state, the opaque ethical standards and the fact that public opinion is clearly against private prisons,

it is hard to imagine what is stopping deprivatisation & justice reinvestment.

Building more prisons for 230+ years has resulted in Australia’s First Nations People to be the most incarcerated Indigenous Community on this Planet with a life expectancy a full decade less than white 🇦🇺 Sadly #Budget2021 failed to address this Australian tragedy.

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