According to the 1994 NATSIS, an estimated 19 per cent of Aboriginal people aged 13 years and over in the Jabiru ATSIC Region had been arrested by police in the previous five years (ABS 1996a: 56). This was very close to the average of 20 per cent reported for the Northern Territory as a whole. At the same time, according to the Wadeye Community Youth Support Management Group, Wadeye has the highest per capita juvenile offending rate in the Northern Territory with young people from Wadeye constituting a significant proportion of all those in detention. Clearly, interaction with the police, and then subsequently with the courts, custodial institutions, and diversionary programs is commonplace in the lives of Aboriginal individuals and families in the region, as well as those associated with them. While recidivism in the Thamarrurr region is frequently portrayed as providing a measure of social dysfunction, precisely how dysfunction might be defined and explained in this particular cultural setting is only just beginning to be understood, although it is clear that the issues are more complex and culturally bound than a simple model of low socio-economic status leading to social dysfunction would suggest (Ivory 2003). One line of argument suggests that by deliberately seeking incarceration via their actions Aboriginal youth are engaging in an alternative rite of passage to manhood (Biles 1983), although Ogilvie and Van Zyl (2001) view detention not as a rite of passage but rather as simply another venue for the construction of identity among marginalised and bored adolescents who are desperate for change to their routine.

Whatever the underlying causes, for the purpose of profiling, recidivism is viewed here in its literal sense as simply the extent to which individuals repeatedly transgress the criminal code. Having said that, one relationship between crime rates 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 society and economy. By presenting select summary statistics from police records, court records and correctional services records for residents of the Thamarrurr region (to the extent that this is possible) this chapter will attempt to derive 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 (Hunter & Borland 1999). Along the way, some sense of the nature of criminal activity and its implied impact on the social fabric will also be provided.