Indigenous Australians are enduring a “health and justice crisis”, the Australian Medical Association has warned, as it uses a new report to draw a strong link between poor health and high incarceration rates.
Statistics show that Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people are on average 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous Australians. Young Indigenous people aged between 10 and 17 are 17 times more likely to be under youth supervision than other Australians.
Undiagnosed mental illness and cognitive disabilities such as those arising from foetal alcohol spectrum disorders, as well as drug and alcohol dependence, all add to the increased incarceration rate, the AMA’s “Indigenous health report card” has found.
A stint in jail also affects long-term health, the AMA said.
“Life expectancy and overall health is most definitely linked to prison and incarceration,” the AMA president, Brian Owler, said. “It’s not just a health problem; it’s not just a law and order problem.”
Failing to take an integrated approach to Indigenous health and incarceration rates would see both problems worsen, Owler warned.
“It’s just not credible for Australia, one of the world’s richest nations, that we can not solve a health and justice crisis that affects only 3% of our population,” he said. “It’s not credible to hear the excuses, well-meaning and unsupported words from successive governments, both federal, state and territories.”
The doctors’ group wants the government to add a goal to its closing-the-gap targets on Indigenous incarceration rates. The targets, set in 2008, set a framework for reducing Indigenous disadvantage.
The minister with responsibility for Indigenous health, Fiona Nash, said: “I can assure that the government will be very, very carefully considering this report and its recommendations.”
A spokesman for Nash said that the government was funding programs that treated the root cause of offending to stop Indigenous people from entering the justice system.
“The Commonwealth is focused on tackling the disadvantage that increases the likelihood of a person coming into contact with the criminal justice system,” the spokesman said. “The key to this is getting children to school, adults to work and making communities safer.”
Last week the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, promised that Labor would set justice targets if it won office.
He also pledged to put more money into “justice reinvestment” programs, which give communities funding for the tools to try to stop offending before it occurs.
A recent report by the University of New South Wales found that one quarter of the prisoners in NSW who had a known mental health disorder had Aboriginal or Torres Strait islander heritage, despite making up just over 3% of the Australian population.