During 2019-20, 174,700 (31 per 1,000) Australian children received child protection services (investigation, care and protection order and/or were in out-of-home care). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were 8 times as likely as non-Indigenous children to have received child protection services. Children from geographically remote areas were more likely to be the subject of a substantiation, or be in out-of-home care than those from major cities. Over 5,300 children were reunified with family during 2019–20.

The Australian Institute of Criminology is Australia's national research and knowledge centre on crime and justice. We seek to promote justice and reduce crime by undertaking and communicating evidence-based research to inform policy and practice.

The articles and the book highlight the wide-ranging health impacts of over-incarceration upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, families and communities, and take a strengths-based approach to identifying solutions.

The Aboriginal Interpreter Service (AIS) facilitates effective cross cultural communication between service providers and Aboriginal people who do not speak English as a first language.  You Understand, Don't You - is a video about a reverse role play performed at the Language and the Law Conference in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory - Darwin.

CSNSW Fact Sheet series covering prisons, visiting an inmate, parole, community based orders, programs and industries.

BOCSAR produces a quarterly report series examining trends in the number of adults and juveniles in prison in NSW. This report presents 24 months of reception, discharge and custody population data and comparisons between the current and previous quarter for age, gender, indigenous status, most serious offence and the average length of stay.

In this article, we consider Don Weatherburn’s claim that Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (ATSILS) have a limited role in reducing Indigenous incarceration. We argue that Weatherburn understates the role of ATSILS. We make our argument in three parts: first, we assess the Weatherburn thesis as it relates to ATSILS. Second, we examine the weaknesses of Weatherburn’s methodology, which overlooks the complexity of Indigenous over-representation in Australian prisons. Third, we explore five counterfactual scenarios of a world without ATSILS, showing the major role ATSILS have regarding the myriad of cross-cultural and socioeconomic issues Indigenous people contend with when coming in contact with the justice system. We argue that ATSILS play an important role in addressing Indigenous over-representation in Australian prisons.

In the last 20 years the numbers of women entering Australian prisons have risen dramatically. Many of these women have a history of sexual assault traumatisation from child sexual abuse as well as physical and sexual abuse they have encountered as adults. The prison system can often exacerbate trauma for female criminal offenders with a trauma history. This paper explores the prison as a possible site of re-traumatisation. The reasoning behind this is that prisons are built on an ethos of power, surveillance and control, yet trauma sufferers require safety in order to begin healing. A trauma-informed approach may offer an alternative to delivering a less traumatic prison environment and experience for female criminal offenders with a history of sexual abuse and assault.