Applying Crime Prevention and Health Promotion Frameworks to the Problem of High Incarceration Rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Populations: Lessons from a Case Study from Victoria

Abstract

This article examines what kinds of policy reforms are required to reduce incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through a case study of policy in the Australian state of Victoria. This state provides a good example of a jurisdiction with policies focused upon, and developed in partnership with, Aboriginal communities in Victoria, but which despite this has steadily increasing incarceration rates of Indigenous people. The case study consisted of a qualitative analysis of two key justice sector policies focused upon the Indigenous community in Victoria and interviews with key justice sector staff. Case study results are analysed in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary crime prevention; the social determinants of Indigenous health; and recommended actions from the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. Finally, recommendations are made for future justice sector policies and approaches that may help to reduce the high levels of incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The Stories We Tell or Omit​: How Ethnographic (In)Attention can Obscure Structural Racism in the Anthropology of Mental Healthcare

“…In Australia, the genocide and slavery of First Nations people, in the service of settler-colonist society and wealth, has culminated in pronounced health and incarceration inequities (Carson et al 2007;Battams et al 2021;Horton 2022). With a life expectancy gap of ten years, and significantly higher unemployment and substance abuse challenges, Indigenous Australians, especially males, are ten times more likely than non-Indigenous Australians to be unhoused and seven times more likely to die by suicide-particularly Indigenous children and adolescents under 15, who are 12 times more likely to die by suicide (Pawson et al 2018;Calma, Dudgeon, and Bray 2017;Campbell et al 2016;Gibson et al 2021).…”