Labor says it will adopt the principle that imprisonment should be a last resort, if elected

Labor has pledged an extra $107m to combat Indigenous Australians’ disadvantage in the justice system in a bid to reduce stubbornly high incarceration rates.

The package, to be announced by Labor’s Indigenous affairs spokesman, Pat Dodson, and the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, on Friday, includes $44m for legal aid and $21.75m for justice reinvestment programs.

If elected, Labor will adopt the principle that imprisonment should be a last resort and work with states and territories to adopt justice targets as part of the Closing the Gap framework, which sets interim goals to overcome disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Guardian Australia’s Deaths Inside investigation found that 147 Indigenous people had died in custody in the past 10 years, and more than 400 since the end of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991.

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Just 2.8% of the Australian population identifies as Indigenous, but Indigenous people make up 27% of the prison population.

Dodson and Dreyfus said in a statement it was “unacceptable” that an Indigenous child was 24 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Indigenous child; the figures stand at 21 times more likely for Indigenous women and 15 times more likely for Indigenous men.

The package includes $40m over four years for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services and $4m for their peak body.

Some $21.75m would be invested to extend the justice reinvestment project in Bourke, New South Wales, and introduce similar programs on a trial basis in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.

The justice reinvestment approach to criminal justice involves a redirection of money from prisons to fund services and infrastructure in areas most affected by high levels of incarceration.

Labor would also invest in Aboriginal-controlled frontline services, including at least $20m for refuges and safe houses and a $21.5m boost to family violence prevention legal services over four years.

“Nowhere is the story of unfairness and diminished opportunity more clearly defined than in the justice gap experienced by First Nations peoples,” Dodson and Dreyfus said.

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“It has been 28 years since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody and yet the vicious cycle that drives the unacceptable over-representation of Indigenous Australians in our justice system continues.”

The royal commission made 339 recommendations – including that imprisonment should be an option of last resort – but a review by Amnesty International in 2016 found implementation had been “patchy”.

Experts attribute the stubbornly high incarceration rates to the lack of diversionary programs for young offenders, intergenerational trauma including through the experience of juvenile detention, as detailed in the royal commission into the Don Dale centre, and harsh law and order policies such as mandatory minimum sentences.

Labor’s policy picks up many of the recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Pathways to Justice report, including for justice reinvestment trials around the country and national criminal justice targets.

In September a coalition of more than 35 human rights, justice and community organisations wrote to the government pleading for action on the rising numbers of Indigenous people in prisons and calling on it to respond to the report.

But in March the Law Council blasted the government for failing to respond, which its president, Arthur Moses, said was “an affront” to the work that that had gone into the report, contributing to the “national disgrace and international embarrassment” of Australia’s Indigenous incarceration rate.

The Coalition’s policy offering for Indigenous Australians has so far been limited to a pledge of a further $42m on mental health initiatives for young and Indigenous Australians, $7.9m for the design of an Indigenous voice to parliament and the extension of the controversial cashless debit card.