This article describes the recidivism of 16,381 prisoners released from Western Australian Prisons between June 30 1975 and June 30 1987. Probabilities of ultimately returning to prison were estimated at 0.45, 0.76, 0.36 and 0.69 for male non-Aborigines, male Aborigines, female non-Aborigines and female Aborigines, respectively. A declining trend in recidivism over the period 1975–1980 was found to have levelled off from 1981–1985. These trends were related to important alterations in the definitions of the law, particularly to the decriminalisation of drunkenness and the introduction of mandatory prison for repeat offences of drunk driving. Recidivism also varied significantly with other demographic and institutional factors. Recidivism in this study was defined as a return to WA prisons for any offence, but varying definitions by deletion of fine defaulters made only minor differences to the estimated proportions returning.
Recent articles on Aboriginal deaths in custody appear to demonstrate that Aborigines and nonaborigines faced equal risks of dying in prison or police lockup over the period 1980-1988. A major criticism of the argument from which this conclusion is made, is the weight it places on a census of prisoners on one particular day during the nine years. In fact figures from such censuses are highly variable. The argument also ignores important risk factors such as sex, age, and exposure to prison of an individual, as well as variations between states, between locations within states, and between times of year. Apart from not convincingly demonstrating that day-to-day risks are similar for Aborigines and nonaborigines, the approach also does not attempt to assess the probability that an individual will ultimately die in prison. Using calculations based on recent research into the recidivisim of Western Australian prisoners, we show that the latter probability, for an Aborigine in Western Australia, is likely to be of the order of three or more times that of a nonaborigine. Such a disproportion may not be accounted for entirely by the over-representation of Aborigines in custody.
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