Australia Yearbook - 2001

488 Year Book Australia 2001
1,727 per 100,000 adult Indigenous population.
The ABS (4512.0, December Quarter 1999, p. 5)
reports that at the end of the century the
Indigenous rate of imprisonment was 15 times
the non-Indigenous rate.
In 1987 a Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody was established. This Royal
Commission found that the over-representation
in prisons and in their contacts with the criminal
justice system was a significant factor in
Aboriginal deaths in custody.
The Australian Institute of Criminology monitors
all deaths in prison and police custody. From
1980 to 1999 there were 846 deaths in Australian
prisons. Of these 393 (or 46.4%) were suicides.
On average there have been 42.3 deaths per year
over the two decades. Of the 846 deaths, 132
were of Indigenous people—15.6% of the total.
Some 44% of Indigenous deaths were by suicide
compared with 47% of non-Indigenous deaths
(Dalton 1999; Dalton 2000).
One cause of death in prison which no longer
occurs is that of execution by the state. In 1900
there were 10 executions (seven of which were in
Western Australia) and in 1901 there were eight
(five in Queensland and three in New South
Wales). The numbers declined to between two
and six for every year until 1923—the first year in
over 100 years in which there were no
executions. There were between one and three
executions in 26 of the next 44 years (until
abolition of the death penalty in 1967).
The 10 and 8 executions in 1900 and 1901 were
down considerably from the peak years of 1826 to
1830 when the annual numbers of executions
were 75, 59, 39, 19 and 80 (and this was in New
South Wales and Tasmania only!).
While the ABS has conducted an annual census of
prisoners since 1994 (and the AIC for several
years before then) we know little more about
prisoners than their demographic characteristics
and their offences. Of the many immigrant
groups in Australia nearly all have rates of
imprisonment lower than that of the
Australian-born population. In 1998 there were
four groups that had imprisonment rates higher
than those of Australian-born: those born in New
Zealand and Oceania; Turkey; Viet Nam; and
Lebanon (Carcach and Grant 2000).
Prison numbers have increased sharply in
Australia in the 1990s, and one line of argument is
that changes to our mental health system, and in
particular the move to deinstitutionalisation,
have put out onto the streets many who
would otherwise not be at risk of minor
offending and victimisation.
The conditions in prisons today are
significantly better than a century ago. In the
early 1890s in New South Wales those serving
sentences of up to 14 days were to receive
only bread and water during their term of
imprisonment. Offenders serving sentences
from 14 days to six months were to alternate
on a weekly basis between bread and water
and normal rations, while those serving
sentences in excess of six months would be
kept on bread and water for the final 14 days
of their terms.
In addition to these dietary restrictions,
offenders serving sentences of less than six
months were required to sleep on a plank
bed without a mattress. In 1894, with the
Government’s authorisation, the then
Comptroller-General of Prisons reinstituted
the gag in order to check the use of what he
termed “blasphemous and frequently vile
and filthy language”. Intensive criticism saw
the Government withdraw this authority in
the following year (Grabosky 1977, p. 99).
A new Comptroller-General, Fredrick W.
Neitenstein, was appointed in 1896 and his
concern was largely with reform and
rehabilitation rather than punishment,
deterrence and retribution. The new century
began with Neitenstein lamenting the fact
that his prisons were warehouses for the
cast-offs of society, people with substance
abuse problems, mental illness, intellectual
impairment and low levels of education and
employment. A century later, these
characteristics describe many in Australia’s
prisons today.
Drunkenness
Much of the writing on Australian history of
the 18th and 19th centuries focuses on
drunkenness. In Peter Grabosky’s seminal
history of criminal behaviour in Sydney,
there are the same number of index entries
for drunkenness as there are for theft, rape,
robbery, murder, homosexual behaviour, and
domestic violence put together (Grabosky
1977).