Despite sweeping reforms by the Keating government following the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the rate of Indigenous imprisonment has soared. What has gone wrong? In Arresting incarceration, Dr Don Weatherburn charts the events that led to royal Commission. He also argues that past efforts to reduce the number of Aboriginal Australians in prison have failed to adequately address the underlying causes of Indigenous involvement in violent crime; namely drug and alcohol abuse, child neglect and abuse, poor school performance and unemployment.
In 1988 Don Weatherburn took up the position of Director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and research: a position he has held ever since. He was awarded a Public Service medal in January 1998 and made a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2006. Dr Weatherburn is the author of two books and more than 180 articles, book chapters and reports on crime and criminal justice.
"In this outstanding new study Don Weatherburn confronts the data, appalling as they are, with his characteristic plain speaking and good sense. no excuses are offered, or simple solutions applied." -- Mark Finnane, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow, Griffith University
"This is a provocative and courageous book by a well-respected criminologist, offering a critique of the over-representation of Indigenous people in custody and of the programs and approaches that are attempting to ameliorate the situation All Australians owe it to Indigenous Australians to reduce these rates of incarceration." -- Dr Maggie Brady, CAEPR, ANU
"Finally Weatherburn reviews some of the clumsy theorizing that have been at the centre of the debates about the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in our criminal justice system since the royal Commission into Aboriginal Death in Custody in the early 1990s." -- Rod Broadhurst, Professor of Criminology at the ANU
"Government policy-makers should be grateful to Weatherburn -- he has done their work for them in this book, providing the blue-print for all future goverment policy that genuinely aims to tackle
Aboriginal overrepresentation in prisons." -- Sheryn Omeri, Barrister, (England & Wales), former criminal solicitor at the Aboriginal Legal Services (NSW.ACT) Ltd
