Fact Check: Amnesty International claim on 'shocking' Indigenous child incarceration rates checks out

Updated

An international human rights campaigner has described the number of Indigenous children in Australian jails as "shocking" by international standards.

The claim: Amnesty International secretary general Salil Shetty claims that the rate that Western Australia jails Indigenous children is higher than the rate black children in the US are incarcerated.

Amnesty International secretary general Salil Shetty claims that the rate that Western Australia jails Indigenous children is higher than the rate black children in the US are incarcerated. The verdict: Indigenous children in Western Australia are incarcerated at a rate of 76 per 10,000, a higher rate than black children in the US are incarcerated, which is 52 per 10,000. Mr Shetty's claim checks out.

Amnesty International's secretary general Salil Shetty said the incarceration rates for Indigenous children in Australia were much higher than for non-indigenous children.

"It's truly shocking, because it's 24 times higher for Indigenous children compared to non-indigenous children in Australia," he told ABC's Lateline.

"I mean, it's even higher in some parts of Australia, like Western Australia. And this is much higher than even the rate at which black people are incarcerated in the United States, which is, as you probably know, the highest in the world."

ABC Fact Check investigates.

Black people in the USA v black children in the USA

Mr Shetty compared the high rates of Indigenous children in jails to black people in the United States but did not specify whether he meant children or all black prisoners.

The context of his interview on Lateline was the treatment of Indigenous children and Australia's possible violation of international standards, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Fact Check asked Mr Shetty's office for the basis for his comparison.

A spokeswoman said he was comparing "the rates of detention of Indigenous young people in Western Australia with the rates of detention of black young people in the United States".

She said the basis of Mr Shetty's claim was data from the United States office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.

Given the context of the statement, Fact Check has compared Indigenous children in Australia with black children, rather than black people, in the United States.

Indigenous children in Australian jails

Data on the number of Australian children in detention comes from the Juvenile Justice National Minimum Data Set managed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

According to the AIHW, children can only be charged with a criminal offence if they are aged 10 and older.

The upper limit for being treated as a young person in the justice system is 17 everywhere in Australia, except in Queensland, where it is 16.

Data from 2013-14 shows that the number of children aged between 10 and 17 in detention on an average day in Australia was 794, a rate of 3.5 per 10,000 young people in the population.

The rate of Indigenous children in detention was 37.11 per 10,000, 24 times higher than the rate of 1.52 per 10,000 for non-indigenous children.

The average day measure reflects the number of young people in detention on a typical day and is calculated by adding the total number of days young people spend in detention and dividing by 365.

A spokeswoman for the AIHW said it favoured the average day measure because it gave an indication of how many young people were supported by the system at any given time and included both the number of young people in detention and their average length of stay.

High rates in WA

Dramatically higher incarceration rates for Indigenous compared with non-indigenous children in detention is repeated across all states and territories.

The difference is particularly marked in WA, where the incarceration rate for Indigenous children is 75.98 per 10,000, 52 times higher than the rate for non-indigenous children at 1.45.

However, the report noted that non-standard data was supplied by Western Australia and the Northern Territory and cautioned making comparisons with other states due to potential differences in the data format, specifications, definitions and quality.

A spokeswoman for the AIHW said the WA data was non-standard because it was not provided in the same format and the same specifications as required for the national data set.

She said that it wasn't possible to say what the differences were, but there was no evidence that the data was biased in one way or another.

Harry Blagg, a professor of criminology at the University of Western Australia, told Fact Check that many of the Indigenous children in jail lived in rural and remote areas.

"That's important because there aren't any diversionary options in these places," he said.

Professor Blagg said police and the courts in those areas didn't have community programs to use as alternatives to putting children in custody.

"But I think we still have very much a frontier culture and we have deep and unresolved issues with our colonial history," he said.

Black children incarcerated in the US

The United States justice department told Fact Check that data on juvenile incarceration comes from an office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention publication, 'Census of juveniles in residential placement: 1997-2013'.

The data shows that black children were in residential placement at a rate of 521 per 100,000 in 2011.

Residential placement refers to juveniles in all types of residential custody facilities.

That rate translates to 52 per 10,000 for comparison to the Australian rates, which is lower than the WA rate for incarceration of Indigenous children.

The 2011 rate for Indigenous children incarcerated in WA was 78 per 10,000.

White children were detained at a rate of 112 per 100,000 in the United States, around five times lower than the rate for black children.

Unlike in Australia, the numbers are calculated on one specified census date each year.

The Australian "average day" data represents "typical day" numbers but is less subject to fluctuation than the United States numbers because it represents an average for the year.

The United States rates include children from the age of 10 to the upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction in each state, which is 17 in 39 states and the District of Columbia, 16 in 9 states and 15 in two states, though there are exceptions to these limits.

In addition, juveniles held in adult prisons are not included in the data.

These two factors both have the potential to increase the rates of children in detention compared with Australian rates.

United States data on people in adult prisons from 2011 shows that around 1300 black prisoners were aged 17 and under.

This would increase the rate for black children incarcerated by about 5 per cent, to around 55 per 10,000, still less than the WA rate for Indigenous children.

What the experts say

Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, told Fact Check that detention was being used as a first, rather than a last, resort for Indigenous young people.

Mr Gooda, who wrote the foreword for an Amnesty International report on the subject released on June 2, 2015, said Indigenous children ended up in detention because of the cumulative effects of many offences.

He said the police, as the first point of contact, could exercise the most discretion in the criminal justice system.

"We've got cases where a kid in WA got charged with receiving a stolen chocolate frog. Would that happen to a white kid? Probably not," he said.

Professor Blagg said there was also evidence that "Aboriginal kids are more involved in minor sorts of offending, and it's probably not surprising given their social situation".

"We have high rates of unresolved intergenerational trauma, which has led to disability, alcohol-related disability, brain injury and mental health issues," he said. "It makes a mockery of our justice system if we incarcerate children who have some sort of cognitive impairment, which we increasingly think is the case."

He said the discussion needed to be shifted away from punishment.

"We tend to criminalise these issues, see them as law and order, but they are really about how we relate to our past," he said.

The verdict

Mr Shetty said the incarceration rate for Indigenous children in Australian jails is 24 times higher than non-indigenous children and even higher in WA.

The latest data backs that up, showing incarceration rates for Indigenous children are 24 times higher than for non-indigenous children across Australia, and 52 times higher in WA.

He also said the incarceration rates for Indigenous children in WA are higher than for black people in the US.

Fact Check has compared the incarceration rates for Australian Indigenous children with United States black children.

The "average day" incarceration rates for Indigenous children in Australia and WA were 37 per 10,000 and 76 per 10,000 respectively in 2013-14.

Black children in the United States were detained at a rate of 52 per 10,000 in 2011, the most recent data available - lower than the WA rate.

Although in the US a single census day is used, the age of children varies in different states and children in adult jails are not included, the latter two factors only increase the incarceration rate of black children by about 5 per cent, still lower than the rate for WA Indigenous children.

Mr Shetty's claim checks out.

Sources

Topics: discrimination, children, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-policy, law-crime-and-justice, police, prisons-and-punishment, australia, wa

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