The Wire

Today, Federal Parliament heard submissions on how to keep Indigenous youths out of gaol. Nearly twenty years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report handed down its findings, Aboriginal people still make up 25 per cent of the national prisoner population, and 82 per cent in the Northern Territory. So, why are the rates of Indigenous incarceration still so skewed? Maybe a holistic approach is needed. Associate professor Richard Midford from the Australian Indigenous Health Infonet – a group specialising in how to actually ‘close the gap’ – thinks so.