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Australian Crime: Facts and Figures 2002
Prisons: Indigenous status
Indigenous and non-Indigenous prisoners, rate per 100,000 adults and ratio of Indigenous to non-Indigenous imprisonment rates, 1991-2001
Sources:
- Australian Bureau of Statistics 1981-2001, Population by age and sex: Australian states and territories (various issues), cat. no. 3201.0.
- Australian Institute of Criminology 1983-1993, Australian Prisoners (various issues), Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra.
- Australian Bureau of Statistics 1994-2002, Prisoners in Australia (various issues), cat. no. 4517.0.
- Cahill, L and Marshall, P 2002, Statistics on juvenile detention in Australia 1981-2000, Technical and Background Paper Series, no. 1, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra.
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, High-level projections of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, June 1996 to June 2006, Unpublished data.
This figure depicts the imprisonment rate of Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons (line graph and left axis) and the ratio of Indigenous rates to non-Indigenous rates (bar graph and right axis). These data include both sentenced prisoners and remandees.
Note: Rate calculations for Indigenous and non-Indigenous adult prisoners are based on the 'high-series' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population projections. This accounts for the effects of increased propensity to identify as Indigenous between the 1991 and 1996 censuses.
What this chart shows
- On 30 June 2001 the Indigenous imprisonment rate was 13 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous prisoners.
- Indigenous prisoners comprised 20% of the total prisoner population in 2001.