Australia’s Aboriginal people are currently 17 times more likely to be in prison than other Australians. The numbers have been rising ever since more accurate record-keeping started in the 1980s.

Here are the most recent incarceration rates (2024) for some different populations around the world, measured as the number of adults in prison per 100,000 adult population.

Australia non-Aboriginal 149

Australia- Aboriginal 2,733

US- African American 901

US- All 614

United Kingdom 144

Norway 54

Indigenous rates in Australia are also much higher than other Indigenous populations around the world. Data on Indigenous incarceration rates can be hard to get and hard to standardise but countries do report on over-representation. Here are some comparisons for 2024 of how many times more likely Indigenous people are to be in prison:

Australia- Indigenous 17 times over-represented

Canada- Indigenous peoples 9 times

United States- Native American 2 times

New Zealand- Māori 7 times

Norway- Sami No identified over-representation

Why include Norway? Because Norway has a world-leading justice system, with low recidivism (return-to-prison) rates and low crime rates. More on this in a later post.

The Australian federal government has established a set of national targets to improve the health and wellbeing for First Nation’s people. The Closing the Gap National Agreement 2020 includes Socioeconomic Outcome Area 10: By 2031, reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration by at least 15% (from the 2019 ‘baseline.’)

In the past year alone, 2023-24, the Aboriginal prison population has increased by 15%.

This graph tracks the changes in numbers since 2010.