CANBERRA, Australia: Australia's burgeoning population of young Aboriginal prisoners is a “national crisis” that needs urgent and wide-ranging government action, a parliamentary report warned Monday. Aboriginal children are 28 times more likely than other Australian children to be sent to a juvenile detention center, the report on indigenous youth in the criminal justice system found. The report comes as the government strives to close the life expectancy gap of more than a decade between Aborigines and other Australians by addressing poor health, unemployment, low education levels as well as alcohol and drug abuse among indigenous people. The government has also cracked down on rampant child sexual abuse in Outback Aboriginal communities in recent years by banning alcohol and pornography and by restricting what Aborigines' welfare checks can buy. While Aborigines make up an impoverished minority of only 2.5 percent of Australia's 22 million population, 25 percent of the Australian prison population is indigenous. Incarceration rates are far worse for the young, with Aboriginal children accounting for 59 percent of inmates in Australian juvenile detention centers. “The overrepresentation of indigenous youth in the criminal justice system is a national crisis,” the report said. Twenty years ago, a major government inquiry into Aboriginal suicides and suspicious deaths in prisons made more than 300 recommendations aimed at keeping more Aborigines out of jail.
