Colonization and Its Legacy: The Correlates of Indigenous Arrest

Abstract

The Indigenous peoples of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all over-represented in their prison systems. Yet despite a shared history of colonization and dispossession, most Indigenous peoples have little if any contact with the criminal justice system. In this article we put forward and test a model of Australian Aboriginal arrest which seeks to explain why some Aboriginal people come into frequent contact with the criminal justice system, but the majority do not. We examine the influence of substance use, social environment, human, financial and social capital, exposure to arrest and experience of racism. The base risk of Aboriginal arrest in the past 5 years is 14.9 per cent; however, the risk of arrest for those who have experienced racist treatment over the past 12 months is much higher for those dealing with drug and alcohol problems or psychological stress, who were removed from their family as a child, or who have experienced racist treatment