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 centre, 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 per cent of Australia's 22 million population, 25 per cent of the Australian prison population is indigenous.
Incarceration rates are far worse for the young, with Aboriginal children accounting for 59 per cent of inmates in Australian juvenile detention centres.
"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.
But in the past decade alone, the imprisonment rate for Aborigines has soared 66 per cent, the report said.
"This is a national tragedy, and questions must be raised as to why the situation has worsened so dramatically after the sweeping reforms recommended" by the inquiry in 1991, the report said.
The 346-page report released Monday by a committee of seven government and opposition lawmakers specializing in indigenous issues made 40 wide-ranging recommendations that attack many underlying causes for young indigenous Australians getting in trouble with police.
The government has yet to respond to the report or any of its recommendations.
They recommend the government recognize as a registered disability the brain damage suffered by Aboriginal children whose their pregnant mothers drank alcohol, known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. That would make children with FASD eligible for special government support services.
The report found most children in one Outback Aboriginal community in Australia's remote northwest had FASD, and Australia-wide, one in 40 Aborigines are estimated to have it.
Such children have difficulty concentrating and are prone to behavioral problems. Most teenagers who suffer the disorder get in trouble with police, the report said.
The report also found many Aboriginal children are partially deaf because they suffer more middle ear diseases than other Australians. This deafness has negative consequences for their school attendance and their experiences with police, courts and detention centers.
The report recommends that the government tests the hearing of all Aboriginal children in their first years of school and provide sound amplification systems in Aboriginal schools.
Jacqui Phillips, national director of the indigenous rights advocacy group Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, welcomed the report's broad scope and emphasis on Aboriginal disadvantage.
"While they haven't tackled racism head on, they encouragingly recognized the importance cultural recognition, celebration of Aboriginal culture in the community and the respect that goes along with that," Phillips said.
Mick Gooda, a government-appointed Aboriginal social justice commissioner, urged the government to implement the recommendations as soon as possible.
"We must act now before we lose another generation to the criminal justice system," he said in a statement.
