Crimwife

Twenty-one per cent of people in prison were on remand, awaiting court, trial or sentencing. The 2006 census showed around 55 per cent of those on remand will leave jail with no conviction, so about one in ten people in jail are serving time for no reason. Fifty-five per cent of inmates had been in jail before

Contrary to the panic that immigration will flood the country with the criminally inclined, 80 per cent of those in jail were born in Australia. The other nationalities with the highest number of offenders were those born in New Zealand (3 per cent), Vietnam (3 per cent) and the UK and Ireland (2 per cent). Indigenous people had fourteen times the rate of imprisonment of non-Indigenous inmates, representing 26 per cent of the total prison population

More recently we have Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, a self-confessed murderer and underworld figure in the 1980s – and best-selling author.

Although I’d applied for a job in a jail, I was in no way prepared for the reality. For one thing, I was surrounded by more Aboriginal women than this city girl had ever seen in one place. Indigenous women made up one-third of the inmates according to the stats, but it seemed like three-quarters to me. Suddenly, after over twenty-five years of living in Australia, a deep sense of this country’s racism came rushing into my mind. After everything this country had been through with its people, why were these women still in slavery? Was this OK with everybody here