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Australia's prison population reaches record numbers

Xinhua, June 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

Australia's prison population reached record numbers in the March quarter, according to official data released on Thursday.

The Corrective Services Australia report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed an increase of 2.4 percent on the previous quarter with 35,467 people imprisoned -- a rate of 194 per 100,000 adult population.

William Milne from the ABS said the number of prisoners had jumped by 6.7 percent in the previous year.

"The overall number of prisoners in Australia has increased annually by 2,221 persons between the March quarter 2014 and the March quarter 2015," said Milne in a statement on Thursday.

Indigenous Australians make up around 2-3 percent of the general population but their incarceration rate remains remarkably higher.

"The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners increased annually by 618 persons (6.7 percent) to 9,838 persons."

"The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imprisonment rate was 12 times higher than the overall imprisonment rate in the March quarter 2015," said Milne.

The Northern Territory (NT), which has the highest proportion of Indigenous Australians of any Australian state or territory at 30 percent, remained the jurisdiction most likely to lock up its residents, with an average daily imprisonment rate of 904 prisoners per 100,000 adult population.

The NT rate increased slower than the national rate, at 4.6 percent, but the territory remains light-years ahead of the next highest jurisdiction, Western Australia, which had 273 prisoners per 100,000 adult population.

In November last year, the Northern Territory government introduced laws allowing police to detain persons on summary offenses for four hours without any paperwork.

The sex ratio in Australian prisons remained heavily skewed towards men, increasing slightly to 1,176 male prisoners for every 100 females.

In contrast to prisoner number increases, the number of persons serving community-based corrections orders has remained relatively steady at 55,995 persons in the March quarter 2015. Endi