Aboriginal deaths in custody

Aboriginal deaths in custody is a political and social issue in Australia. It rose in prominence in the early 1980s, with Aboriginal activists campaigning following the death of 16-year-old John Peter Pat in 1983. Subsequent deaths in custody, considered suspicious by families of the deceased, culminated in the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC).

The final RCIADIC report, published in 1991, did not find higher rates of death of Aboriginal people compared to non-Aboriginal people; however, it did highlight deficiencies in care, both systemic and individual, and disproportionate rates of imprisonment due to historical and social factors. As of 2020^[update], Aboriginal people maintain a disproportionate level of exposure to the justice system and incarceration in Australia. One of the recommendations of the RCIADIC was that statistics and other information on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal deaths in custody should be monitored nationally on an ongoing basis, by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC). As Australian census and prison statistics include both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the counts have included both groups, as Indigenous Australians.

The Australian Institute for Health and Welfare^[1] reports that the total Indigenous age specific deaths in 2018 were 164 per 100,000 for 25-34 year olds, and 368 for 35-44 year olds. These are the most relevant age groups for the current 12,000 Indigenous prisoners, with a median age of 32. In a group of 12,000 Indigenous 25-44 year olds, an average yearly death rate of around 32 per year occurs even outside prison.^{[citation needed]} The Indigenous death rate in prison is about 15 per year, or half of this.^[2]

As of June 2021 the AIC had recorded 489 Indigenous deaths in custody since the Royal Commission (June 1991). The majority (65%) had been prison deaths with almost all the rest of the deaths in police custody or custody related operations.^[3] The AIC's monitoring program reports Indigenous Australians have made up 18% of prison deaths^[4] and 20% of deaths in police custody or custody related operations^[5] in this time. This is well above their proportion in the general population that was 3.3% in the 2016 national census.^[6]

Although the majority of deaths occurring in prison custody have been of natural causes (58%), hanging deaths accounted for 32%, but the latter have shown a marked decrease in recent years. Although they are greatly over-represented in the prisons, Indigenous prisoners have had a lower death rate than non-Indigenous prisoners since 2003. In 2020-21 the death rate for Indigenous prisoners was 0.09 per 100 compared to the non-Indigenous rate of 0.18.^[7][8] Unfortunately, for technical reasons it is not possible to calculate death rates of Indigenous or non-Indigenous people in police custody or custody related operations.^[9] Of deaths in police custody, the total between mid-1991 and mid-2016 was 146, with 47% attributed to accidental death (with most of these happening under police pursuit). 21% were attributed to natural causes, with self-inflicted deaths accounting for 19%. There is, however, a number of cases in which calls have been made for greater scrutiny, as avoidable deaths, such as those of Ms Dhu, Tanya Day, David Dungay and Rebecca Maher. Additional protests focusing on Aboriginal deaths in custody, accompanied by renewed media attention, were triggered by the murder of George Floyd in the US as part of the June 2020 protests in Australia.

Aboriginal deaths in custody and high incarceration rates were originally absent from the Australian Government's "Closing the Gap" strategy. As part of a 2018 pivot to a new phase, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) drafted targets to reduce Aboriginal custody rates by 2028.