Community-Based Strategies in Aboriginal Criminal Justice: The Northern Territory Experience
| Author | William Tyler |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486589502800201 |
| Published date | 01 June 1995 |
| Date | 01 June 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Articles
Community-Based Strategies in
Aboriginal Criminal Justice:
The Northern Territory Experience'
William Tylert
Recent attempts to involve the remote and small town communities of
Northern Australia in their own policing and correctional services have often
been held up as amodel for developing Aboriginal criminal justice policies.
Such aproposal raises important questions as to both the construction of the
post-colonial 'community' in remote and settled Australia and the
sociological principles by which these criminal justice schemes (eg night
patrols, community wardens, community corrections) have been constituted.
The paper explores the constructions of the Aboriginal community over the
past two decades (ethnographic, politico-administrative and postmodemist)
as a background to the development and implementation of
community-based criminal justice schemes in the Northem
Territory.
A
typology of post-colonial criminal justice strategies is developed which
identifies four 'ideal types' in which the initiatives may be positioned. These
are the mediative (community wardens, night patrols), the educative
(community justice programs), the neo-colonialist (new forms of imposed
European laws and policing) and the incorporative (pervasive and totalising
forms of control). The possibility of transposing these Northern Territory
schemes to other Aboriginal situations is then critically evaluated in the light
of differing socio-political constructions of 'community'.
In the past decade, massive attention and criticism have been directed towards
the criminal justice systems
of
Australia in their treatment of Aboriginal
peoples. However, significant improvements in outcomes are often hard to
discern. Indeed a number of recent studies have indicated that the considerable
re-allocation of Commonwealth and state resources to a wide range of
programs and reforms has not led to any visible or consistent decrease in the
rates
of
Aboriginal arrest, imprisonment or deaths in custody (McDonald &
Howlett 1992). Although it may still be early days in the flow-on effects
of
some of these measures, there is still the disturbing evidence that Aboriginal
imprisonment rates are on the increase. In some states, such as New South
Wales, there has been a jump of 80% over the period 1987 to 1991 (Cunneen
1992a), the period in which the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in
Custody was being conducted. Associated life quality measures are equally
depressing. Indices of Aboriginal life chances show little improvement over
the past two decades. For Aboriginal males, who interact most with the
*Received: December 13 1993; accepted in revised form: November 25 1994.
tBA (Qld), B Ed (Qld), M Ed (Alberta), PhD (Kent at Canterbury). Associate Professor in
Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Northern Territory University, PO
Box 40146, Casuarina, NT, 0811
127
128 (1995) 28 The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology
criminal justice system, there appears to have even been some deterioration in
recent census indicators of income and employment (Kelly 1993; Taylor
1993).
Against this background, the recent reforms of the policing and correctional
policies of remoter towns and communities of Northern Australia may offer
some hope. There, at least, the self-determination policies recommended and
encouraged by the Royal Commission appear to be having some effect in
reducing rates of Aboriginal criminalisation. This success story appears to be
emerging from the smaller towns with large town camps, such as Alice
Springs and Tennant Creek, as well as from the more stable communities of
the remoter areas in Central Australia, Arnhem Land and the Barkly
Tableland. These reforms include not only the expansion of the Aboriginal
Police Aide scheme, but a range of more recent innovations such as the
establishment of community wardens, night patrols and community liaison.
These, together with a community-based corrections scheme associated with
the Community Justice Program, constitute a novel attempt to involve
Aboriginal community authority structures in the criminal justice system.
These point to possible models for the rest of rural and remote Australia, if not
for many urban or metropolitan areas as well (Wootten 1993). Langton, head
of the Aboriginal Issues Unit of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths
in Custody in 1989-90, has even argued that such schemes could work in
discrete Aboriginal residential areas such as Redfern, an inner-city suburb of
Sydney (Langton, quoted by Thomas, 1993). Cunneen (1992b:27) and
Airo-Farulla (1992) also express interest in the Northern Territory schemes,
though they stress the importance of localised solutions. Together with
experiments like the Victorian Community Justice Panels, these initiatives are
widely seen to provide the basis for Aboriginals to exert control over their own
criminal justice processes.
These commentators, echoing the comments made by the Royal
Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991, National Report, vol 2,
pp 243-5), see in the Northern Territory innovations a potential for reducing
many of the problems of Aboriginal peoples' relations with the Australian
criminal justice system. Greater community involvement should address
problems arising from over-policing, cultural insensitivity of police officers
and magistrates and the general dislocations of public life caused by
disempowerment, dispossession and colonisation. The Northern Territory
experiments are a local response to this particular crisis in the Australian
criminal justice system, a response to internal and external criticism of its high
Aboriginal imprisonment rate and very high rates of criminalisation of young
people from remote communities such as Groote Eylandt (McDonald 1984;
Biles 1983). However, the proclaimed apparent success and desirability of
these schemes, let alone their suggested extension to large urban centres,
raises a number of areas of criminological and of sociological enquiry. Of
particular importance are the varying conceptual models of the term
'community' as a sociological entity and the specific meanings which this
term may take when employed as an instrument or vehicle of criminal justice
(policing, sentencing and correctional) policy.
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