Last week, we hosted David Lammy MP on a visit to Australia. He came here as part of his review into possible racial bias against BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) people in the British criminal justice system. This work was commissioned by former PM David Cameron, and has the full endorsement of our new PM Theresa May. You can read more about it here.
David came to Australia to see how the federal and state governments handle Indigenous people within the courts and prisons. Some of the challenges are familiar – including over-representation of minority groups among people going through the system, and under-representation among the officials working in the system. In the UK, BAME individuals currently make up over a quarter of prisoners – compared to 14% of the wider population of England and Wales. Here, the imprisonment rate for Indigenous Australians is 13 times higher than that for non-Indigenous people.
As always, we can look and try to learn from each other on these issues – what we do well and not so well – to inform thinking about our own policies and practice. To this end, David visited Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Canberra and met a wide range of people across the justice and community systems.
You will have to wait until next year to read the report and see David’s conclusions. But the fact that his visit coincided with the emergence of appalling images of juveniles in detention at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory underlined the importance of this work, in both our countries. For me, this brought to the fore the issues we each face around race and detention, and the need to find the right balance between punishment and rehabilitation, security and respect for human rights. In this context, I welcome PM Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to announce a Royal Commission into the NT’s juvenile detention centres.
These issues are hard for all of us. They raise uncomfortable questions about our own societies. They can bring out a sense of defensiveness or guilt; and at times we might want to look the other way. That’s why professional inquiries, conducted in a calm and measured way, have an important role to play. At the end of the day, we all want the same thing: to ensure our criminal justice systems give everyone, of whatever race, colour, creed or nationality, a ‘fair go’.