The Crisis in Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Continues at Record Levels

As of 2 January 2025, there have been 582 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the release of the Royal Commission report into this issue on 15 April 1991.

This is despite the 339 recommendations made by the national inquiry all aimed at resolving the issue, and the truth of the matter, as Senator Lidia Thorpe has repeatedly raised in federal parliament over recent years, is most of these solutions are yet to be implemented.

So, as the Albanese government was spruiking the Voice to parliament early on in its tenure, the Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung senator repeatedly raised rolling out the report’s blueprint of reforms, along with those included in the 1997 Bring Them Home report, which provides solutions to the crisis in ongoing forced Aboriginal child removals.

Deaths in custody are fatalities that occur whilst in the custody of police, corrective services or juvenile detention. And these deaths include those occurring as a result of a police operation or attempts to foil an escape from custody.

The Australian Institute of Criminology’s Deaths in Custody Real Time Dashboard advises that since 1 January 2024, 24 First Nations people have died in custody. And its December released report into custodial fatalities for the financial year 2023/24 also shows that over that 12 month period, 24 Indigenous people died in some form of custody.

And while 24 Aboriginal deaths in custody is not the highest number of fatalities over a 12 month period, it’s close: over the financial year 2022/23, 31 First Nations custodial deaths occurred, whilst in 2002/03, 25 Indigenous people died in custody.

Stark overrepresentation

The Hawke government announced the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in August 1987. The investigation involved 99 Aboriginal deaths that occurred over the period 1 January 1980 through to 31 May 1989. And the reason for this was, as is the case today, significant numbers of Aboriginal people were dying prematurely in the custody of police or prison guards.

The AIC’s record reveals that over 1987/88, 6 Aboriginal deaths in custody transpired, and by 1986/87, this figure had risen to 18. Over the last decade, the lowest 12 month figure was 15 deaths over 2019/20, while the highest number of deaths, comprising of 31 fatalities, occurred in 2022/23.

In terms of overall deaths in custody for the period 2023/24, a total of 104 deaths occurred in the custody of corrections, juvenile detention or Australian police. So, the number of non-Indigenous deaths is significantly higher than First Nations deaths in custody and critics sometimes cite this as a point to suggest that the raising of Indigenous custodial deaths is unwarranted.

However, the 24 Aboriginal deaths in custody over 2023-24 comprised of 23 percent of the total deaths in custody, while First Nations peoples only comprise 3.8 percent of the entire population of this continent, which means they’re representation amongst the overall custodial death toll is disproportionate.

Another key factor relating to why Aboriginal deaths in custody are of significance is that the lands of First Nations people were violently invaded and usurped by the British, which means these people who have been dispossessed of their lands, as well as continuing to have their self-determination denied, are dying at disproportionate rates inside their occupier’s prisons.

This point is further highlighted by the disproportionate rate at which First Nations people are incarcerated in the Australian prison system.

The latest ABS custody figures show that 15,711 Indigenous adults were incarcerated, which amounts to 35 percent of the total prisoner population. At the time that the 1991 RCIADIC report was handed down, that figure comprised of 14 percent, which while significantly lower, was still starkly disproportionate.

“These deaths aren’t invisible to our communities. They are highly visible,” Dr Chelsea Watego told the ABC in 2021. The Mununjali and South Sea Islander academic added that the system often locks up First Nations people for matters that non-Indigenous people aren’t imprisoned for.

Indeed, the First Peoples of this continent are amongst the most incarcerated people on the planet.

Suspicious circumstances

The other reason that Aboriginal deaths in custody are significant is the suspicious circumstances surrounding them or the straight-out abuse and neglect by the authorities that cause the deaths of First Nations prisoners.

When the causes of death are considered, the fact that no police officer or prison guard has ever been convicted in relation to any of these deaths that occur in their custody screams of injustice.

And as the protest chant goes, “They say accident. We say murder.”

The death of 21-year-old Gomeroi man Eddie Murray at Wee Waa police station on 12 June 1981 is one of the fatalities that was inquired into by the RCIDIC.

The commission went with the initial cause of death, which was that Murray hung himself, despite his having such a high blood alcohol concentration that this was improbable and on exhuming his body at a later date, it was found that his sternum was broken, which is no hanging injury.

In December 2015, Dunghutti man David Dungay Junior was held down in the prone position by five specialist prison guards, who were kneeling on his back, as he cried out he couldn’t breathe, until he died, in the hospital ward at Long Bay Gaol. And regardless of footage of the incident being available, no charges were ever laid. But Corrective Services NSW did issue an apology on inquest conclusion.

Criminal charges laid against officers involved in a death in custody are rare, however convictions are nonexistent.

A stark example is the shooting of Warlpiri teen Kumanjayi Walker by then NT police officer Zachary Rolfe in Yuendumu in April 2019. Despite Rolfe firing three times, with the two last bullets directly shot into the side of the man’s ribcage, whilst Walker was on the ground with the officer’s partner on top of him, the ex-cop was acquitted of murder, manslaughter and violent act causing death.

And in an Australian first, an unidentified prison guard who shot handcuffed and shackled Wiradjuri man Dwayne Johnstone in the back as he attempted to flee outside a hospital in March 2019, was charged with manslaughter, after a NSW coroner brought the inquest into the death to an early close and recommended the Director of Public Prosecutions lay charges.

The Corrective Services NSW officer then had his charge upgraded to murder in August 2022, however he was then found not guilty in 2023.

Other recent Aboriginal custodial deaths comprised of youths being chased into a river by police and drowning, a teen on a stolen motorcycle being hit head-on by an unmarked police car and multiple cases involve a First Nations inmate pleading for medical assistance over the intercom in their cell, only to be ignored, as they weren’t believed, and then subsequently dying due to lack of treatment.

“We need to shift the gaze back: not upon our people, our communities and speak of what is wrong with us,” explained Dr Watego, during the 2021 documentary Incarceration Nation.

“But call out the systems that are perpetuating this violence, including the individuals that are part of those systems – to hold this place accountable to the lies that it tells itself about how its systems work.”