Aboriginal Criminological Research - Research of a Workshop Held March 3-4, 1981

• NCJ Number: 81033
• Author(s): W Clifford
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 46 pages
• Corporate Author: Australian Institute of Criminology
• Sale Source: Australian Institute of Criminology; National Institute of Justice/
• Language: English
• Country: Australia

Annotation

Reported here is a summary of workshop discussions concerning the plight of the Aborigines who constitute about 1 percent of the population, but about 30 percent of the prison population, in Australia.

Abstract

Workshop participants represented expertise in the fields of both anthropology and criminology. The form of the workshop consisted of an orientation paper followed by a series of unstructured discussions. The first general discussion topic was the stages of procedure through the criminal justice system, i.e., the meaning of crime, law enforcement, courts, and corrections. The second topical area concerned the types of research and programs to be considered, e.g., description, empirical, evaluative research, case studies, and the collection and collation of data on which further work could be based. The orientation paper emphasized that accommodation between the white man's law and Aboriginal custom is possible and has been achieved in such areas as the Northern Territory and Western Australia. This success is because serious crimes, which are prohibited by most penal laws in the world, are also prohibited by Aboriginal law. While murder, robbery, and abduction are crimes not tolerated by Aborigines any more than they are by a Western society, problems do arise in relation to property, kinship, and rules of social obligation. A bias exists in the Australian criminal justice system which makes the Aborigines appear to be much more criminal than other communities when, in fact, the reverse is probably true. Of the charges which are most frequently brought against the Aborigines, drunkenness constitutes almost 40 percent. Future efforts should attempt to document all Aborigine cases passing through the criminal justice system, encourage the development of Aboriginal criminology as a special branch of anthropology and criminology, develop oral history studies with older Aborigines on the meaning of crime in their community and on the nature of sacred offenses, and promote action projects to improve given situations of conflict. Tabular data, a list of conference participants, and 10 references are given. A bibliography lists 50 publications.