RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: OZschwitz: 'Sausage factory' NT courts cited in crime squeeze  Fri Dec 26, 2008 3:43 pm | |
| THEY call the offence "driving whilst black".
"If you are white you can drive around Northern Territory towns like Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs and rarely get pulled up by the police," said a lawyer, Glen Dooley. "But if you are black you can be pulled up regularly, given the police focus on Aboriginal people."
Mr Dooley described as a "disgrace" the largely unnoticed statistic that 83 per cent of prisoners in the NT's overcrowded jails are Aborigines.
He warned the rate of imprisonment - almost four times higher per capita than elsewhere in Australia - is set to increase because of "blinkered" government policies that focus on the perceived "barbarism" of Aborigines.
"Ninety-five per cent of a so-called crackdown on crime in the Territory appears to be a never-ending search to bully and shock people into mending their ways," Mr Dooley said. It was hardly surprising the NT - which is "infamous for its mandatory sentencing policies" - leads the rest of Australia for locking up its citizens.
Mr Dooley cited the building of 18 police stations in remote communities under the federal indigenous intervention, plans for a $320 million, 1000-bed jail near Darwin and Australia's toughest mandatory sentencing for violent crimes as measures hastening the criminalisation of Aborigines.
"The Government here is adopting policies that are politically popular but they are doing nothing to stop the spiralling rate of crime," said the principal lawyer for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency.
"Instead of sending increasing numbers of Aboriginal people to jail the Government should be providing better housing, health and education to help those who are struggling in life."
Such people "do not see jail as a place of deprivation".
But Chris Burns, the NT's Minister for Justice, said the Government's law and order policies were working, with a fall in the number of offences committed against the person.
Dr Burns said there were 199 fewer such offences in the September quarter - a 12 per cent decrease compared with the September quarter last year.
Mr Dooley told the Herald issues that were "fertile ground for mediation" or would have been settled by traditional law in the past now end up with charges before a magistrate at "sausage factory" bush courts.
Of 372 jail sentences for traffic offences in 2006-07, 359 were imposed on Aboriginal people. "Gauged from my personal and professional experiences, Aboriginal drivers are pulled over much more often than non-Aboriginal drivers."
He said remote communities should have "activity best guided by trained coaches, youth workers, health workers, school-based support workers and the like".
"Extra police were sent to communities under the intervention to protect children but we haven't seen many charges resulting from that," he said.
The Opposition's justice spokeswoman, Jodeen Carney, said the Government's policy of "simply banging people up in jail is doing nothing to change the mindset of offenders when they are on the inside".
When Labor won office in 2001, she said, 60 per cent of prisoners were Aboriginal. Aborigines make up 30 per cent of the Territory's population.
LNK
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