NEW RESEARCH PAPER!
In this new research paper we have provided
significant context on the pressing issue of incarcerations of remote living
Indigenous Australians. This included addressing incarceration from the theoretical
paradigm as a form of mobility and discussing several key aspects of this
nexus, namely: Complex individual behaviours and motivations; High churn and
return mobility; the ‘immobile’ cohort; historical influences and the question
of whether, in some circumstances, incarceration may be a rite of passage.
Discussion on these aspects highlights both the complexity and multi-layered
factors driving and affecting incarcerations, and in turn how these relate to
pre-existing mobilities, such as household mobility.
Our examination and profiling of recent
data on incarcerations for Indigenous people in the NT of Australia and review
of Australian and international comparative literature points to a range of
likely social, cultural and intergenerational effects. With such high rates,
and with many prisoners coming from remote Indigenous communities, the magnitudes
of impacts for remote communities in the north of Australia and for individuals
who are incarcerated are also likely to be far reaching.
Using a Poisson Distribution to estimate the
proportion of 20-39 year-old residents as a means of demonstrating the scale of
effects, our results indicate, on average, about 1 in 20 men and 1 in 200 women
aged 20-39 from remote communities may be incarcerated at any point in time.
However, for some communities these rates could be as high as 14% for men and
up to 2% for women.
Such proportions are sufficient to
suggest significant impacts on present and future population compositions and
on population growth for individual communities. For example, the absence of
males is likely to increase the proportion of single parent families. The
absence of both males and females aged 20-39 means that fertility rates are
likely lower comparative to communities without such proportions incarcerated
at any given point in time. Besides a rise in single parent households and a
reduction in the number of newborns (from women and men in their prime child
bearing years being in prison), incarceration represents another form of
temporary out ‘migration’, with flow-on effects for the community including
social and economic dysfunction.
Finally, our study demonstrates the
complex and multifaceted issues facing residents of remote Indigenous
communities in the NT and northern Australia more broadly. Rising rates of
incarcerations may be both a symptom of and contributor to historical and
contemporary impacts from the effects of colonisation, disempowerment and
breakdowns in traditional rules and norms. To help depict and understand some
of these layers of complexity we now propose a framework which lays out
community level impacts for Indigenous remote communities in the NT. The aim of
the framework is to describe in simple terms the interrelationships between
high incarceration rates and the resulting social, economic and demographic
impacts found in our statistical analysis and the literature (Figure below)
 |
| A framework of community level impacts from incarceration; created by the authors |
The starting point of our framework is
the significant proportions of incarcerated people from remote communities at
any point in time. These lead to specific demographic, social and economic
impacts. On a broader level, these impacts can bring about the loss of social
capital and the loss of social control, leading to greater dysfunction within
the community and ultimately increased criminal behaviours. Augmented levels of
criminal behaviour in turn contribute to higher numbers of incarcerated people.
These interrelationships display the fierce cycle that high incarceration
numbers found in remote communities can generate. While in essence this
framework can be applied to any community, prior dysfunction in a community,
such as in remote Indigenous communities, high incarceration rates and the
location of the community, present critical factors in the extent of the
effects.
At the moment, a range of ‘Closing the
Gap’ targets are in place nationally to reduce disparities between Indigenous
and other Australians in the areas of school attendance, life expectancies and
work outcomes. The study we undertook underlines Mick Gooda’s call for the need for a
social justice indicator as part of that strategy.
The final pre-publication manuscript of the paper has been published on ResearchGate...
The publishers version is available here…
DemographyNT
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