MAXINE McKEW: Ten years ago, the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody delivered its final report.
It had been one of the most exhaustive and expensive royal commissions in Australia's history.
On the surface, its job was to examine why 99 Aboriginal people died while in prisons and police lock-ups during the 1980s.
But in fact the commission found itself examining almost every aspect of the relationship between indigenous Australians and modern Australian society.
The widespread suspicion amongst Aboriginal people that police and prison officers were directly responsible for many deaths in custody was not borne out by the royal commission.
There were no prosecutions.
But the commission did find that far too many Aboriginal people were being locked up, for far too little reason.
Ten years on, how much -- if anything -- has changed?
Murray McLaughlin reports from Darwin.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: In August of 1987, the town of Brewarrina in NSW exploded in an ugly riot.
The immediate cause was the death in a police cell block of an aboriginal man, Lloyd James Boney.
It was one death too many felt the furious crowd and PM Bob Hawke agreed with them.
A few days later he announced a Royal Commission into aboriginal deaths in custody.
COL DILLON, FORMER ATSIC COMMISSIONER: I think it would be one of the most far-reaching and most in-depth Royal Commissions that this nation has ever seen.
ELLIOTT JOHNSTON QC, FORMER ROYAL COMMISSIONER: The task of this commission is to ascertain how these various deaths occurred, why they occurred and what is necessary to be done to prevent such deaths occurring in the future.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: It would take four years and cost $40 million to answer those questions.
One fundamental factor was identified early on.
ELLIOTT JOHNSTON QC: If you took people in custody -- Aboriginal, not Aboriginal -- the proportion of deaths was very close to being identical.
So we began to look further and we then realised that the basic problem was the disproportion of Aboriginal people in custody.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: The Royal Commission found that in August 1988, for example, there were 29 times more Aboriginal people in police custody than the proportion of the Australian population could justify.
The vital step was to reduce those numbers.
The commission generated 200 shelf metres of documents, millions upon millions of words now lodged in vaults around the country.
And it delivered 339 recommendations which touched nearly every agency of Government.
BOB COLLINS, FORMER LABOR SENATOR: In terms of all those recommendations, it came down to one essential thing -- the rate of imprisonment of indigenous people was far too high.
It wasn't that they were dying at a greater rate than non-indigenous prisoners.
So really all those recommendations were distilled in saying to all governments in Australia -- adopt all of the strategies you can to reduce the incarceration rates of indigenous Australians.
Now if that's the benchmark and I think it should be, you have to say the last 10 years have been a disastrous failure in that regard.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Not entirely a disastrous failure, police services especially have been forced to rethink their business.
The Royal Commission marked out police because two-thirds of the deaths investigated had occurred in police custody.
The architecture of police lock-ups has been improved, arrest and custody rules rewritten.
BRIAN BATES, NT POLICE COMMISSIONER: There can be little doubt it had a significant impact particularly in terms of what this police force did in terms of its processes, procedures and practices.
As far as possible our aim is not to have people locked up in police cells, particularly those that are taken into protective custody.
So the sobering up shelters are a prime example of that and the work of the night patrols are essential in that respect.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: These days drunk Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory are mostly kept in sobering up shelters rather than in police cells.
And that's helped.
But according to the country's foremost expert on Aboriginal crime and punishment, the problem has simply been shifted elsewhere.
ASSOC PROFESSOR CHRIS CUNNEEN, CRIMINOLOGY, SYDNEY UNIVERSITY: One of the significant contemporary points in relation to deaths in custody is that most of them occur in prison rather than in police custody, so there's been a change in the location of custody.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: The police may be keeping fewer Aborigines in cell blocks but the courts are sending far, far more to prison.
ASSOC PROFESSOR CHRIS CUNNEEN: It's clear that we haven't managed to reduce the number of indigenous people or the rate of imprisonment of indigenous people in prison.
In fact, what's happened over the last 10 years is precisely the opposite.
We're incarcerating indigenous people at greater rates than we were 10 years ago.
COL DILLON: It's very disappointing 10 years on that as I say we're still having deaths in custody.
There have been seven so far this year in Western Australia.
Our young people are still going into prison at an alarming rate.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Col Dillon retired 10 days ago from the Queensland Police after 36 years service.
A former ATSIC commissioner with policy responsibilities for deaths in custody, Col Dillon deplores tougher sentencing regimes around the country, mandatory sentencing laws in particular for their effect on imprisonment rates of Aboriginal people.
COL DILLON: Mandatory sentencing, I mean that is absolutely horrific on Aboriginal people.
I mean they're at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale and of course they are the -- I suppose the victims that suffer more so than other parts of society.
So they're continually going through the revolving door into correctional centres.
They're no sooner out than they're back in again.
DAVID EVERTON, ABORIGINAL LEGAL AID: You all know there was a Royal Commission 10 years ago so there were a whole load of recommendations that came out of that Royal Commission.
One of them was that jail was the last resort.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: In 1987 was the death of one man, Lloyd Boney, that jolted governments into action.
Last year, it was the death of one boy, a 15-year-old from Groote Eylandt who died in a juvenile detention centre in Darwin.
He had committed minor property offences but neither the magistrate, the prosecution, nor his defence lawyer canvassed an alternative to punitive detention -- a so-called diversionary program.
HAZEL LALARA, GRANDMOTHER: I knew my grandson had a chance to get a diversionary program which didn't happen which I feel very upset about it.
It has affected my family.
Two days after that incident at the detention centre, my two sons tried to suicide themselves because they grew up together.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: The death of the boy from Groote Eylandt stirred the Commonwealth Government to fund an Aboriginal Interpreter Service and diversionary programs to keep juvenile offenders out of jail in the Northern Territory.
Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams, who brokered the deal, visited remote Aboriginal communities in the Top End last week to check on progress.
It's not encouraging.
More than 80 programs have been licensed since last September.
But only 28 Aboriginal juveniles in the Northern Territory have actually been placed in a proper program.
Have you actually seen any programs in action on this trip?
DARYL WILLIAMS, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, we have talked to a lot of people who are involved in them.
You have to bear in mind there are a lot of agencies and a lot of them have been doing different things over different times.
BOB COLLINS: We're in a flurry of activity about a diversionary program.
10 years on in the NT, we're talking about diversionary programs.
Did those diversionary programs get funded by the Federal Government as a result of any recommendations of the deaths in custody royal commission?
Did they get funded really because of mandatory sentencing in the NT?
They got funded because of the tragic suicide of a 15-year-old kid who killed himself in the detention centre.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: But there's not not the same diversionary program for adults in the NT.
This man got a mandatory one-year sentence last year for breaking into a mine site and stealing biscuits and cordial, his third offence.
He had to go to jail in Darwin, 600 kilometres away.
Even Aboriginal offenders who live in Darwin are also being jailed far away from home.
The pressure of numbers in Darwin jail means Correctional Services in the Northern Territory is regularly shuffling prisoners to Alice Springs.
It was a basic recommendation of the Royal Commission that Aboriginal prisoners be held as close as possible to their families.
Christine Casey is fighting for the return of her husband from the Alice Springs jail.
He was sent there after serving in Darwin jail, 15 months of a 22-month sentence for violent crime.
CHRISTINE CASEY: He did the crime here.
He was sentenced here.
Why not let him do his time here?
Why send him to Alice Springs which is down south for me, 1,400km away.
I can't afford to get down there, you know.
JON TIPPETT, NT LAW SOCIETY: The recommendation 168 was one of the most fundamental recommendations of one of the most wide-ranging and searching inquiries in Australia's history that was designed to stop people taking their own lives.
And instead of complying with the recommendation, the Northern Territory Government is transporting Aboriginal people as if they were cargo to a private prison in Alice Springs that runs for profit.
DARYL MANZIE, NT CORRECTIONS MINISTER: We do the best we can to minimise the traumas that prison brings about and in fact, I think the record of the Territory in relation to deaths in custody is better than elsewhere in the country.
The fact is it's still very difficult to operate prisons and maintain the best possible circumstances for prisoners because there are times when people will have to be moved and the basic rule has to be the best operation of that prison system.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: Christine Casey has sought an order from the Northern Territory Supreme Court to have her husband returned to Darwin jail.
She told the court that she took her three children to visit their father more than 70 times during the 15 months he was in jail in Darwin.
CHRISTINE CASEY: They're not getting to see their dad, you know.
Thank you, my darling.
Their father taught them that -- to give me flowers.
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: She admits her husband is being justly punished but moving him to the Alice is punishing her and the children as well.
CHRISTINE CASEY: It has affected them hard.
I can see it and I can feel it because it has put more pressure on me having to deal with them, having to give them answers to their questions like where is dad, how come dad is in Alice Springs?
MURRAY McLAUGHLIN: This largely Aboriginal congregation in a Darwin Catholic church yesterday marked with prayers the 10th anniversary of the end of the Royal Commission.
The commission was a landmark in the history of Australia's indigenous people.
It took them and their concerns more seriously perhaps than official Australia had ever done before.
But in terms of the basic problem, too many Aboriginal Australians going to prison and too many never coming out.
There's not much reason 10 years on for these people to give thanks.
ASSOC PROFESSOR CHRIS CUNNEEN: We're locking up people in a way we haven't done in our recent history.
So if we continue to expand our use of imprisonment, if we continue to build more prisons to incarcerate more people, without a doubt we will continue to have increases of deaths in custody.