Recent Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Highlight Surging Crisis

Two Aboriginal men have just died whilst being incarcerated at the Australian Capital Territory’s only adult prison over the space of just four days. And this devastating development that took place at the Alexander Maconochie Centre is made all the more shameful as this facility is the only correctional centre in the country that’s been designed to function as a ‘human rights prison’.

A 73-year-old Aboriginal man, who was on remand, died within the correctional facility that operates on Ngunnawal Country on Thursday 13 February 2025, while a 38-year-old First Nations man died in the early hours of the 17th, as he was suffering a medical episode, and despite the “significant efforts” of staff and paramedics, he died at the scene.

The Aboriginal Legal Service asserted on the day after the second man, Howard Hall, died during a health emergency that these fatalities would weigh heavily upon Aboriginal communities throughout the region.

The Australian Institute of Technology Real-Time Deaths in Custody Dashboard reveals that since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody tabled its final report, which included 339 recommendations, on 15 April 1991, 587 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in the custody of police or corrections officers, with eight of these deaths transpiring since 1 January 2025.

Indeed, even though Australia conducted this national inquiry in the late 1980s, the crisis around these deaths has not only been ongoing, but the number of fatalities has increased, which is due to government neglect and systemic racism that’s now further highlighted by the fact that a third such death involving a 38-year-old Aboriginal woman in a WA facility took place last Friday.

Grave overrepresentation

“The impacts of these individuals’ deaths will be felt not only by their immediate families, but throughout their communities,” said Aboriginal Legal Service NSW/ACT chief executive Karly Warner.

“It is unacceptable that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still dying in custody more than 30 years on from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,” continued the lawyer in an 18 February statement.

“The ACT government must do more to address its shameful overimprisonment of Aboriginal people.”

First Nations deaths in custody occur within a policing and prison system imposed upon Indigenous peoples by an outside force that too denies their self-determination, and statistics reveal these deaths disproportionately impact communities, as while Aboriginal deaths can account for close to a quarter of all custody deaths, First Peoples only represent 3.8 percent of the entire population.

Another crisis at play, which has only dramatically increased since 1991, is the overincarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the Australian prison system.

Take the ACT, for example, where in 2021, there were 101 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adult inmates, which accounted for 26 percent of the total prisoner population. In 2023, 107 Indigenous adults were in the Alexander Maconochie Centre, making up 28 percent of the overall population, while in September 2024, these figures were 126 inmates, accounting for 30 percent of those inside.

“We know that police and courts are the gateway to prison,” Warner, a palawa woman underscored, “and that Aboriginal people face worse outcomes at every stage of the criminal process.”

A lack of accountability

Numerous coronial inquiries into Aboriginal deaths in custody have identified neglect and abuse as having played a factor, however almost all such official investigations have resulted in no recommendations to a Director of Public Prosecutions to consider a criminal investigation into a death, and even when they do, no police or prison officer has ever been convicted in relation to one.

Deaths in custody involve fatalities that occur either in the custody of Australian police or corrective services agencies, however they also include deaths that occur as a result of a police operation or in an attempt to prevent someone from escaping from custody.

Aboriginal deaths in custody over the last decade have included children pursued by police to a body of water in which they then drown, kids and adults taking their own lives in prison, shootings by police and prison guards, head on collisions during police pursuits, the denial of medical assistance in prison until a person dies, and the application of force whilst an inmate is held in the prone position.

As Senator Lidia Thorpe has pointed out repeatedly, deaths are continuing to occur because many Royal Commission recommendations are yet to be actioned, and the Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung politician adds that the problem is exactly the same with the crisis in forced Aboriginal child removals, as the 1997 Bringing Them Home report recommendations have too been neglected.

A national emergency

Warner further set out that in order to “meet its obligations under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the ACT government must take urgent action to address the real drivers of mass incarceration – overpolicing and overcriminalisation – and invest in evidence-based, community-led solutions and the priorities they have agreed upon in the National Justice Policy Partnership”.

The third Aboriginal death in custody to have occurred over the last fortnight, and within the space of nine days, involved a 38-year-old woman dying at Boorloo-Perth’s Melaleuca Women’s Prison last Friday, 21 February.

According to staff, the First Nations woman was found unresponsive in her cell on Friday morning, and despite paramedics being called upon, she died at the scene.

The Western Australian carceral system is notoriously harsh. The 3,456 First Nations adults incarcerated in that system last September, according to the ABS, accounted for 45 percent of the total adult prisoner population in that state, while Aboriginal adults only make up 4.4 percent of the jurisdiction’s overall population.

Sixteen-year-old First Nations boy Cleveland Dodd took his own life in Perth’s Casuarina Prison, an adult maximum-security facility that’s been operating Unit 18, a wing reserved for child inmates, and yet he hadn’t even been convicted of a criminal offence.