The CEO of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency says that mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory doesn’t make fiscal sense.
Yesterday on 98.9 FM’s Let’s Talk, Priscilla Collins spoke on the current incarceration crisis in the NT and the way policy makers engage with communities.
In 2014, First Nations people accounted for 86% of the prison population in the territory and 96% of the juvenile detention population consisted of Indigenous children.
Ms Collins points to mandatory sentencing as one of the factors that plays in to such a high incarceration rate saying that instead of magistrates making decisions, it’s bureaucrats.
