At the 1994 NATSIS, an estimated 35% of Aboriginal people aged 13 years and over in the East Kimberley reported that they had been arrested by police in the previous five years (ABS 1996: 70). This was by far the highest arrest rate reported out of all the ATSIC Regions in the country (only one other region, Ceduna with 32%, reported a rate over 30%). In Western Australia as a whole the rate was 25%, while rates for the West Kimberley were 25% in Broome and 16% for Derby. More recently, a survey based on a wide sample of Kimberley Aboriginal communities and aimed at identifying major justice issues as perceived by residents of the region, found that 77% of Aboriginal respondents knew someone who had made a court appearance, with over half of these being family members (Colmar Brunton WA & Colmar Brunton Social Research 2002: 68-9).
The fact is, interaction with the police, and subsequently with the courts and various custodial institutions, has become so pervasive as to form a major part of the social and economic system with which many Aboriginal individuals, families and households in the East Kimberley find themselves encumbered. While this landscape of recidivism may be seen as providing some measure of social dysfunction within the region, without a clear understanding of precisely what a notion of dysfunction might constitute in this context, it is more usefully viewed in its more literal sense as the extent to which individuals transgress the criminal code. This is the manner in which the involvement of the regional population with the criminal justice system is dealt with here.
Having said that, one relationship between recidivism and the regional society and economy that is reasonably apparent concerns the degree to which past and present convictions and interaction with police, courts and prisons, influence individual chances of participating successfully in the regional economy. Criminologists have long been interested in the relationship between unemployment and crime. However, they have spent much more time examining the effect of unemployment on criminal behaviour, than on the effect of a criminal conviction on an individual’s employment prospects (Hunter and Borland 1999). By presenting select summary statistics from police records, court records and prison records for residents of the East Kimberley (to the extent that this is possible for this region) this chapter will attempt some redress to this imbalance by deriving estimates of the population for whom contact with the police and a criminal conviction might represent a barrier, or at least a brake, on social and economic participation. Along the way, some sense of the nature of criminal activity and its implied impact on the social fabric will also be provided.
Crime statistics in Western Australia are available from a variety of sources reflecting different stages of interaction with the criminal justice system. The initiating factor, of course, is contact with the police either by way of reporting a crime or via an apprehension (arrest), or summons. Such actions yield a range of data concerning the nature of offences and offenders, with separate reporting for juveniles and adults. Individuals charged with an offence are then further processed by the courts (a charge being an allegation laid by the police before the court or other prosecuting agency that a person has committed a criminal offence). Statistics relating to the activities of the lower courts (which predominate in the East Kimberley) are captured by the Department of Justice CHIPS (Children’s Court and Petty Sessions) database. As for those charged who are found guilty of an offence, imprisonment data are available from the Department of Justice’s Total Offender Management System (TOMS), while non-custodial community corrections data can be extracted from the records of the Community and Juvenile Justice division of the Department of Justice. Data regarding those held in police lock-ups are provided via the WA Police Lock-up Admissions System which records all admissions to and exits from police lock-ups across the state.
The Crime Research Centre (CRC) at the University of Western Australia has access to these data for analysis and reporting under agreements with the WA Police and WA Department of Justice. Using these data, the CRC produces an annual comprehensive compendium of crime and justice statistics for the State—Crime and Justice Statistics for Western Australia—detailing the nature and pattern of offences and sentences, and the characteristics of offenders and those sentenced. Among the characteristics explored is ethnicity, and the basic ethnic classification employed by the CRC in its reporting is Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal. However, the manner in which Aboriginality is determined varies between police and court data. In the Police Offence Information System (P49), ‘ethnic appearance’ is a term used to describe the visual appearance of victims and offenders. The field is completed on the basis of the attending police officer’s subjective assessment of the person’s appearance, and is recorded for operational purposes only. As the CRC cautions, given the subjective nature of the assessment upon which these data are based, it is possible that a person attributed to a particular group does not belong to that group. Data from the lower courts presents a far greater difficulty in terms of establishing Aboriginal participation in the criminal justice system: in Western Australia as a whole the Indigenous status of defendants is unknown in 85% of cases (Loh and Ferrante 2001: 20).
In addition to these problems, three other constraints on official data sources are specific to the development of a meaningful profile of offences and offenders in the study region. First of all, some data are coded to Statistical Division level, which in this case corresponds to the whole of the Kimberley region. Second, while information on outcomes from individual lower court proceedings in the East Kimberley can be obtained from the Department of Justice, the extent to which these involve usual residents of the region cannot be determined, although CRC research does suggest that the vast majority of offences are committed in the offender’s region of usual residence and so, presumably, they are also tried there (Morgan and Fernandez 2002). Finally, the largest single grouping according to ethnicity in court data is that whose ethnic status is unknown, which leads to uncertainty in the actual numbers of Aboriginal as opposed to non-Aboriginal offenders. In similar fashion, prison data record only the last known address of prisoners leading to potential (and unmeasurable) error in attributing individuals to particular regions.