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source of income. For 29% the main source of income was through employment. Another21% reported no income at all (ABS 1996 page 21).The fact that one in five young people report no income at all is a disturbing featurelikely to increase the probability of criminalisation. The Royal Commission intoAboriginal Deaths in Custody drew attention to the large number of Indigenous youngpeople who could not find work and the apparent relationship between unemploymentand contact with juvenile justice agencies (National Report Volume 1 page 378). The1994 ABS survey found that higher rates of arrest contribute to lower employment ratesin the Indigenous population, particularly for male teenagers (ABS 1995b page 2). Thesurvey ‘established a strong negative relationship between arrest rates and subsequentemployment outcomes … The analysis found that, all other things being equal, the fact ofhaving been arrested within the previous five years prior to the survey reduced thechances of employment by half’ (ABS 1995b page 2). In other words, unemploymentamong those who were arrested was double the rate of those who had not been arrested.The issue is particularly important because nearly 40% of Indigenous male youthreported being arrested during the previous five years (ABS 1995b page 40).Unemployed persons, adults and youth, also reported a higher proportion of multiplearrests than those who were employed (ABS 1995a page 58).EducationA number of submissions to the Inquiry drew attention to the relationship betweenpast racist policies and practices in education which excluded or marginalised Indigenouschildren and contemporary low secondary school retention rates and low participationrates in tertiary education. Truanting and early school leaving are intimately connectedwith the likelihood of child welfare and juvenile justice intervention (NSW AECGsubmission 362 page 4, ALSWA submission 127 page 185).Past educational policies have contemporary consequences.In our recent past, the education and training system … have been tools to systematically stripAboriginal communities of not only our culture, but the living heart of our communities, ourchildren … Schools were not only used to deny Aboriginal children a culturally appropriateeducation whether separated or not, they were also used as points from which Aboriginal childrenwere ‘removed’ (NSW AECG submission 362 page 1).Until comparatively recently, several jurisdictions had ‘policies of not allowingAboriginal children to attend country schools if the local whites protested. Schools whichdid admit Aboriginal students usually practised a strict physical segregation inclassrooms. Both these practices, which highlight more obvious forms of institutionalracism, occurred within the memory of many of the parents of today’s adolescents’(Groome and Hamilton 1995 page 20). In Western Australia, where Aboriginal childrenwere excluded from schools until the 1950s, ‘a cross generational pattern of alienationfrom schools as white institutions [has] resulted from the policies’ (Beresford and Omaji1996 page 54).