- 澳洲70岁老汉为娶泰国小三，杀42岁中国妻后用硫酸在垃圾桶里溶尸灭迹 ... [2013/12]
- 中国房市泡沫？你显然被忽悠了。 [2013/06]
- 陈震阳才是“朱令中毒”这个悲剧的真正制造者 [2013/05]
- 看富裕的澳洲人怎样哭穷: 三分之二大学生生活在贫困线以下？ ... [2013/07]
- 美海军朱姆沃尔特万吨舰的上层建筑从复合材料改成钢 [2013/08]
- 原来那个惊掉下巴的传言是邓文迪和英国前首相布莱尔有婚外情 ... [2013/06]
- 星星还是那个星星，月亮还是那个月亮，美国不再是那个美国。。。 ... ... [2012/11]
- 叙利亚叛军使用中国红箭8导弹 [2013/06]
- 随想：65年中国战机击落美机 被美机碎片崩51个洞 [2013/06]
- 陈震阳的‘鉈中毒’结论是严重错误的 [2013/05]
- 弗吉尼亚核潜艇可能要变驼背了。 [2013/06]
- 30多年后中国东风3弹道导弹仍在沙特虎视眈眈伊朗，以色列 [2013/07]
- 美国每周有5位父母被亲生子女杀害 [2013/12]
- 美国海军成功降落x47b无人机于航空母舰，史上第一次 [2013/07]
- 制造和设计的区别：彭丽媛在美国用iphone，奥巴马不敢 [2013/12]
- 德国将退役f4鬼怪式战斗机 [2013/06]
- 意大利花10亿美元建f35战机总装厂，豪赌西欧战机的前途 [2013/06]
- 哈飞运12f，能否早日完成海监型，航母型？ [2013/06]
- 这张照片说明澳洲华人大选中应该投陆克文一票 [2013/06]
- 如果这是中国，恐怕八国联军都来了 [2013/05]
- 华人尚不富裕，同胞仍需努力 [2013/06]
| 在澳大利亚西澳州，平均24个土著人就有一个在监狱。在澳大利亚土著人多数的北领地，平均120个居民就有一个在监狱，高于世界著名的美国的平均137人有一个坐监狱。 澳大利亚2200万人有3万多人关在监狱中，平均每6天有一个犯人死于狱中。 难怪这是一个华人记者写的，难怪恶评如潮，难怪半天就被撤出网站的首页。 Policy failure as prisons fill with indigenous people DateMay 27, 2013 Inga Ting Writer - goodfood.com.au View more articles from Inga Ting Every day in Australia, 30,000 people wake up in a jail. Statistically, one of those people dies every six days. Last week the Australian Institute of Criminology delivered its long-awaited report into deaths in custody. Its national deaths in custody program was established after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in recognition that timely, accurate data was crucial to reducing the unacceptably high number of deaths in our prison and police systems. That this report is not months but years late is a snub to the importance of that goal. A decade ago, the program was delivering its reports within days of the close of the reporting period - the 2003, 2004 and 2005 reports were delivered within one month. Then, without explanation, each of the next three reports took between 16 months and two years to appear. The 2009-11 report has been almost 3½ years in the making. Finally, the edition covering 2009, 2010 and half of 2011 is here. You might expect that this report - which marks 20 years since the royal commission and paints a horrific portrait of the state of indigenous criminal justice - might have grabbed some headlines. Yet newspapers of the day carried a single article - an opinion piece co-written by the institute's research analyst Mathew Lyneham, buried on page 10 of The Australian. The government's press release - with the Orwellian title ''20 Years on - Improvements in death-in-custody rates but more to be done'' - labelled the report as "encouraging" and "welcomed … findings that death-in-custody rates have decreased significantly in the past decade" and are "some of the lowest recorded". But that was spin. The truth is that rates of death are only low because rates of incarceration are at a record high. In fact, the actual number of indigenous deaths in prison is on the rise, with the number in 2009-10 (14 deaths) equal to the highest on record. Given the central aim of the royal commission's 339 recommendations - to urgently reduce indigenous incarceration rates - and the report's finding that the proportion of indigenous prisoners had almost doubled in the 20 years since the commission delivered those recommendations, the findings look more like an abject failure. Every state and territory government committed to implementing the commission's recommendations when the report was handed down in 1991. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent. So what has been achieved since? At the time of the commission's final report, indigenous people were eight times more likely to be imprisoned than non-indigenous people. A decade after the report was handed down they were 10 times more likely to be imprisoned. Today, they are 15 times more likely. In Western Australia, which has the highest indigenous imprisonment rate in the country, indigenous people are close to 20 times more likely to be jailed than non-indigenous people. One in 24 is behind bars. Over the past decade, the indigenous rate of incarceration has soared 11 times faster than the non-indigenous rate - and this at a time when the country is locking up more people per capita than at any other period. It gets worse. The gap between the indigenous and non-indigenous incarceration rate is growing. Last year, Australia's prisoner population rose 1 per cent; the national indigenous prisoner population rose 4 per cent. Racialised punishment is nothing new in this country. It bears remembering that punishment is not just about the act of locking someone up or imposing a penalty. It is an expression of power and a means of control. Historically, Australia has always applied different forms of punishment to Aboriginal people. (For example, Aboriginal people were subject to public execution, lashing and flogging long after these brutal measures ceased to be used on non-indigenous people.) Criminologists have traced racialised punishment in an unbroken line back to colonisation. Deaths in custody are evidence of human rights violations occurring on our watch. That prison deaths are on the rise is evidence of a creeping trend towards mass incarceration. (In 2009, the Australian Human Rights Commission predicted the Northern Territory would have the highest incarceration rate in the world. With about one in every 120 territorians behind bars - compared with 1 in 137 in the US, the world's leading jailer - it may now hold that dubious distinction.) In their final report the commissioners wrote: "One of the most disturbing findings of the commission has been the frequent failure of … authorities to learn from the deaths which had occurred, and to act to prevent subsequent deaths in similar circumstances." How many more lives must quietly slip away under the watch of our police and prison guards before we sit up and pay attention? That's 2325 since 1980. And counting. |