It’s easy to live under false pretences. It’s easy to see only what we want to see, to hear only what we want to hear, to believe only what we want to believe. Sometimes, in this chaotic world of ours, amidst a frenzy of conflicting truths and clashing philosophies, it seems that there’s no choice but to cast out certain inconvenient and ugly peripheries. So, in order to make some sense of this disorder and discord, we develop a tunnel vision of sorts; we perceive society through a set of monoculars, fine-tuned and tailored for our needs. With them, we’re able to better focus on what directly concerns us, preserve our core values in an era where absolute truths and consensus are hard to come by, and maintain some semblance of a worldview in an age of uncertainty and deconstruction. However, if we’re not careful, these monoculars may also blind us to the issues and stories that, more than anything else, should remain in the foreground. Without proper care, this tunnel vision may cast out of sight unignorable tears in the fabric of our society, as well as the uncomfortable truth that we ourselves may be perpetrators of prejudice.
In his 1952 novel, ‘Invisible Man’, African-American writer Ralph Ellison opens with the following:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids ... I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me … When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.[1]
Amongst the racial and ethnic diversity of modern day Australia, it’s hard to imagine that Ellison’s scathing commentary on 20th century America could apply to us. It’s hard to imagine that any injustice in our Elysian neoliberal democracy could be structural or acute in nature. So we sit comfortably on the perches reserved for the ‘woke’ and ‘educated’, tweeting about Black Lives Matter, Trump and climate change, looking disdainfully down at the ignorant. Rarely, if ever, do we acknowledge the grievances playing out right before us, those invisible blemishes of injustice, invisible for no other reason except our forgetfulness and unwillingness to see them.
Some Worrying Numbers
In 1987, in response to rising public concern regarding the abnormally high rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody, the incumbent Hawke government announced a Royal Commission to examine the sociocultural and legal roots of the issue. Forty million dollars and four years later, the Commission released its final report where one curious finding stood out: Aboriginal people do not die at a higher rate than non-Aboriginal people in custody. Rather, the disparity lay in the rate at which Aboriginal people are incarcerated. [2] The report also included 339 policy recommendations for the Federal Government, all of which were aimed at reducing imprisonment rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
So, three decades after the Royal Commission, where do we stand? How much closer are we to those lofty notions of justice that we hold so dear? Has Australia become a post-racial paradise, or does the unpleasant stench of colonialism and injustice remain? Let’s take a look at the numbers.
Since the release of the final report, 474 Indigenous Australians have died in custody. [3] As of 2018, only 64% of the Commission’s recommendations had been implemented.[4] Beginning in 2006, researchers at Curtin University conducted a decade-long study of the incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians; unsurprisingly, their findings were less than ideal. Despite making up just 2% of the national population, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults constitute 27% of the prison population.[5] In 2016, roughly 20 in every 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were incarcerated.[6] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were seven times more likely to be charged with criminal offences, yet 12.5 times more likely to receive a sentence of imprisonment than non-Indigenous people.[7] For offences categorised as ‘acts intended to cause injury’, 60% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders received a custodial sentence, compared to just 30% of non-Indigenous offenders.[8] Between 2006 and 2016, Indigenous incarceration rates increased by 41%, while the imprisonment rate for non-Indigenous people rose by just 24% in comparison. [9]
What is to be done? Are we doing it?
This concerning lack of progress was the subject of a 2018 report by the Australian Law Reform Commission titled ‘Pathways to Justice’. [10] The Inquiry was focused on addressing what it perceived to be a major cause of Australia’s worrying incarceration trends: the disproportionate imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are ‘cycling through the criminal justice system and serving short sentences of two years and under’— a group that represents 45% of all Indigenous Australians in custody.[11] The report’s accompanying recommendations were centred around the idea that incarceration is an inefficient method of deterrence, and that jail is often a counterproductive tool that encourages reoffending more than anything else.[12] It contended that Indigenous Australians are being imprisoned for petty crimes and offences for which rehabilitation would be a more mutually-beneficial and positive response. The ALRC recommended a policy mix of ‘justice reinvestment’. This is a strategy founded upon the idea that a reduction in short prison sentences for Indigenous Australians, and an increase in rehabilitation and early-intervention programs, would create net gains for greater society; communities would benefit from less crime and increased safety, while the economic costs of incarceration are greatly reduced. The Inquiry went on to stress that the funds required for the appropriate support and rehabilitation programs may, in the long run, cost less than the funds required for detaining increasing numbers of prisoners. It argued that these economic gains could be ‘reinvested’ in community-led programs that will reduce offending and recidivism via early intervention through empirically proven methods.[13]
These recommendations seem justified enough. In 2016, PwC Australia estimated that Indigenous incarceration costs our economy $7.9 billion per annum.[14] Current trends and forecasts expect that to grow to $19.8 billion per annum by 2040. To put that into context, just $13 billion was invested into transport & communication in the 2020 Federal Budget.[15]
Taking all this into account, it’s difficult to understand why such little action has been taken by government after government. The ideas set forward in Pathways to Justice were hardly innovative or novel. In fact, similar solutions exist in the 50 similar reports that have been published in the past three decades.[16] The NSW Bar Association’s Tony McAvoy made no exaggeration last year when he told a parliamentary inquiry that ‘[t]here seems to have developed a culture of reporting in lieu of doing”.
Where’s the urgency? Who’s to blame for this idleness and lethargy? The answer is right in front of us, calling desperately to be seen. Yet, perhaps on account of its ugliness, we refuse to see it. In a democratic society, when action is not taken, when pressing issues are cast to the peripheries, when governments can get away with neglect, the blame—in many ways—is on the people. It is we who vote. It is our interests that politicians and policymakers must appeal to (or pretend to appeal to). At least most of the time, it is we who decide the course of our nation’s history. It naturally follows that, far too often, it is our blindness that fuels injustice. Far too often, we find ourselves acting out Ralph Ellison’s 1952 prophecy.
Forgetting History
Perhaps the problem lies in our collective and inherently human forgetfulness. In his 2007 article, Anthropologist Paul Connerton wrote extensively about a phenomenon he called ‘structural amnesia’, where ‘groups forget what is not socially important to them or part of their current identity’.[17] There could not be a more apt description of modern society than this.
We’re compulsive forgetters. We take in the world as it is in the present moment and perceive the status quo without regard for past wrongs and injustices. We’re content knowing that we live in a nation governed by the rule of law and relative judicial impartiality. We’re content in our democratic traditions and individual liberty. All this content rests upon a refusal to see historical realities.
The 1987 Royal Commission insisted on and stressed the relevance of historical thinking, arguing that contemporary issues in relation to Indigenous incarceration are a ‘direct consequence of their colonialism and … the recent past’.[18] Pathways to Justice, while being focused on the criminal justice system, made frequent reference to the ‘lasting and intergenerational’ effects of the Stolen Generations— to White Australia’s destruction of Indigenous culture, identity, land and language.[19] A 2008 survey on Aboriginal children found that members of the Stolen Generations are far more likely to live in households where problems related to alcohol abuse and gambling existed.[20] It also noted that members of Stolen Generations are more likely to have had contact with mental health services, to have trusting relationships and to have been arrested.
Back in the 50s, Australia’s infamous dispossession and removal policies were justified by one single misguided adage, that ‘the native problem could be solved ... if children were separated from their parents and taught the white man’s way of life’.[21] You would think that, by now, we would have realised the flaws in such a statement. It’s nothing less than pure ignorance to expect a group of people, with over 60,000 years of history, to live comfortably in a foreign society where they are a negligible minority, to live harmoniously under institutions and power structures that have caused them centuries of pain and loss — and yet that’s exactly what we’re doing now. We forget the past and walk carefreely through the quasi-justice of the present. From time to time, we express sorrow and remorse for the Stolen Generations and the victims of past prejudice, never for a second being troubled by the unpaid debts we still owe them. In her 2011 article on Indigenous histories, Griffith University professor Anna Haebich wrote brilliantly on this unfortunate feature of contemporary Australia:
Forgetting and ignorance are never benign conditions: they do things. Ignorance breeds in a forgetful climate of not knowing by bestowing value on misinformation and failing to question its veracity or authority ... discriminatory practices become normalised to the extent that they are rendered unremarkable and virtually invisible to the wider society, even as they may assume increasingly harsh forms.[22]
What next?
There’s this common misconception that history follows a linear course from barbarism to civility, from inequity to fairness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sporadically, humanity loses its bearings and wanders off on some crooked trail. Yet, time and again, one way or another, we find our way back to a righteous path. Cynicism, apathy and nihilism do nothing but push us farther along the wrong course; to be true proponents of change, we must maintain our idyllic conceptions of justice and equity, act on our convictions and, slowly but surely, bring our world closer to a world that is truly for everyone.
Footnotes
[1] Ralph W Emerson, Invisible Man (Random House, 1952) 1.
[2] Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Final Report, April 1991) vol 1–5 (‘RCIADIC’).
[3] Teela Reid, ‘Aboriginal Lives Ought to Matter Not Only When We Die, but While We Are Alive’, The Age (online, 15 April,2021) <https://www.theage.com.au/national/aboriginal-lives-ought-to-matter-not-only-when-we-die-but-while-we-are-alive-20210414-p57j63.html>.
[4] Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Review of the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (August 2018) 1–780 <https://www.niaa.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/rciadic-review-report.pdf>.
[5] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Prisoners in Australia, 2016 (Catalogue No 4517.0, 8 December 2016).
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid table 17.
[10] Australian Law Reform Commission, Pathways to Justice: Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (Report No 133, March 2018) (‘Pathways to Justice’).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Pauline Wright, ‘President’s Message—Call for a Stronger Focus on Sentencing Alternatives’ (2017) (34) Law Society Journal 8.
[13] Pathways to Justice (n 9).
[14] PwC’s Indigenous Consulting, Indigenous Incarceration: Unlock the Facts (May 2017) 27.
[15] Australian Government, Economic Recovery Plan for Australia, Budget 2020-21 (2020).
[16] Lorena Allam, ‘Stop Reporting and Start Doing, Lawyers Tell NSW Inquiry Into 'Inhumane' Indigenous Incarceration’, The Guardian (Sydney, 26 October 2020).
[17] Paul Connnerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting’ Memory Studies (2008) 60-68 <http://mss.sagepub. com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/59>.
[18] RCIADIC (n 1).
[19] Pathways to Justice (n 9).
[20] Robert Parker and Helen Milroy, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health: An Overview’ in Helen Milroy, Pat Dudgeon and Roz Walker (eds), Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice (2014) 25, 30.
[21] Cited in Smoke Signals (Melbourne August-September 1958), 3.
[22] Anna Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia's Stolen Generations’ (2011) 44(4) Journal of Social History 1033, 1033–1046.