Where the Gap Becomes a Cell Door

How performative politics distract from the systemic punishment of First Nations people

While newspapers, online opinion pages, social media feeds, and the worst of us in Parliament grandstand about Welcome to Country ceremonies, as though acknowledging the oldest continuous culture on earth were some national burden. The true disgrace grows quietly in the shadows, behind razor wire and under the gaze of surveillance systems.

The latest Closing the Gap report lays it bare again: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are being imprisoned at grotesquely disproportionate rates, the continuation of a much older injustice that began with colonisation and has been renewed through policy and practice.

As of March 2025, 2,559 Indigenous adults were imprisoned per 100,000 — nearly 17 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. In WA and the NT, the figure soars above 4,000. This is not incidental. First Nations people have been made the product of policy, history, and neglect. The system is working exactly as designed.

Every few months, new statistics land with a dull thud, met with a day or two of outrage before the nation retreats to safer debates; national symbols, which songs play at sporting events, feigned panic over imagined threats to Anzac Day. Distractions that soothe the conscience while the crisis deepens.

Meanwhile, cell doors keep slamming, and Aboriginal lives are swallowed by a system forged not for fairness but for control; a machine designed to keep power in its own hands. One hungry for profit and Aboriginal help the bottom line, we are the bottom line in so many ways.

From the beginning, the colonial state has reached for First Peoples with a clenched fist; over land, language, culture, bodies. You can feel it in the laws that remove children. Hear it in the scrape of a pen turning minor infractions into permanent records. See it in sentencing regimes that turn poverty into prison terms. And when that grip is prised even slightly, the backlash is swift and unforgiving. This is what happens.

In the NT and Queensland, watch houses meant for short-term adult detention have become warehouses for children, many as young as ten, the legal age of criminal responsibility in Australia; infantile. A number so low it draws global condemnation. Inside the watch houses the air is thick. The lights never switch off, no chance of nightmares when you’re living one.

In Alice Springs, up to twenty people have been crammed into a single cell, with no bedding for all and drinking water flowing from a tap above a blocked toilet. Children in Queensland have spent weeks in similar conditions, their mental health eroding under trapped between concrete floors and merciless fluorescent light.

These places, are not places of safety or care. They are places of degradation. Children are denied fresh food and meaningful contact with the outside world. Some must pass adult male cells to reach the shower, enduring fear and enduring shame physical and cultural. Medical care is scarce. In 2025, in this places, at the hands of these systems, childhood offers no protection.

In these conditions, we are not preventing crime, we are carving it into the lives of children. Teaching them the state will meet early mistakes with confinement and harm.

It is no accident that Aboriginal incarceration rates continue to rise. This is the result of deliberate policy choices. From the failure to implement the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’s recommendations, to the over-policing of minor offences, mandatory sentencing laws, and the chronic underinvestment in diversionary programs. These choices, left unchallenged, take root early.

Aboriginal children are removed from their families at staggering rates and swept into the current we call the ‘child protection to prison pipeline’. By the time they reach the dock or the holding cell, via divisional vans, their stories have already been shaped; by surveillance, by the fracturing of bonds, by the quiet dismantling of home.

The data is clear, yet numbers are brittle things. We are taught to see statistics when what lies behind them is the heat of a life. Each absence leaves an empty chair, a missing verse in the family song. These losses do more than hollow out homes; they loosen the weave of culture itself, until entire histories slip quietly away.

So let’s speak plainly: this is not a crisis born of Indigenous behaviour, no matter how feverishly the worst corners of media and politics insist. It is a crisis born of a justice system that has never recognised justice when the face before it is Aboriginal.

The law here is no blindfolded figure. It peers from behind the bench, weighted with the values and prejudices of those who wrote it. Ironically it is a system more reliant than ever on the forensic, yet blind to the granular detail of lives impacted by stolen land, broken cultures, and a refusal to let people exist on their own country. It has all become normal, it is the norm here.

So while incarceration rates climb, the national conversation fixates on performative outrage. We’re told Welcome to Country is ‘divisive’. That it’s an imposition to be reminded whose land we’re on. It is apparently easier to rail against a thirty-second ceremony than to confront the state-sanctioned inequality still taking lives. How many layers of humanity does one have to shun before you feel how cold the bars are, how hot the night?

The most verbose critics of Welcome to Country are often mute when those doing the welcoming end up in cells or their loved ones end up on the concrete. The hypocrisy is exhausting. It is also deadly, but not in the Aboriginal English way. Every moment spent on faux cultural controversies is a moment stolen from the work of dismantling the structures that are stealing lives.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

“Tough on crime” is the perfect companion to this theatre of distraction, a slogan polished for the evening news. It requires no imagination, no courage, no willingness to face the human causes of harm. It a fix and a fixation for those with power and those that report on it. It’s far easier to stack people in concrete rooms than rebuild the systems that failed them, that failed us. Easier to promise crackdowns than to invest in housing, healthcare, and education. It wins headlines while abandoning the harder, slower work of making safety through justice.

While we’re told it’s about safety, the truth is more brutal. A 2023 Australian Institute of Criminology report found that Aboriginal people die in custody at higher rates not because they’re at greater risk once imprisoned, but because they are so much more likely to be there in the first place; the system demands it in number and example.

This is what “tough on crime” delivers. A conveyor belt toward the machinery and of and incarceration and, too often, early death through the churn of its gears.

The solutions aren’t mysterious. They’ve been carried for generations by those closest to the harm. Until governments cede real control to Aboriginal communities, to invest in self-determined solutions, the gap will remain a chasm.

We have decades of reports outlining what works: justice reinvestment, culturally led diversion programs, bail reform, community-controlled legal services, adequate housing, accessible health care, and culturally safe education. The solutions exist. What’s missing is the political will to implement them in full.

The truth is, mass incarceration serves a political function. It lets governments appear “tough” while deflecting from their failure to address root causes. It reassures some voters that colonial hierarchies still hold. It sends a chilling message: step out of line, and the full weight of the state will come down on you.

Incarceration doesn’t end with the sentence. The ripple effects are profound. A prison record can shut people out of housing, jobs, travel. People and their closest are forever marked and families fracture through the strain. Children grow up without parents or the love they considered dearest; disorientated. The trauma compounds across generations, feeding the very cycles the system claims to fix.

It’s tempting to despair. But despair is a luxury Aboriginal people have never had and we can prove it. Across the country, people work relentlessly to keep others out of the justice system: night patrols, mediation, cultural camps, on-country healing. Often underfunded and overlooked, these are the real frontlines of justice.

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The rest of the country stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into distraction. The other asks us to see incarceration not as abstract policy failure, but as a mirror of how far we are from real reconciliation.

Reconciliation without justice is not reconciliation. It is branding. A photo opportunity. A bridge to nowhere. Some crimes do need a judicial response and do deserve imprisonment, victims of crime need to be heard above all others, but who listens to those that are victims of the system itself?

Real solutions certainly don’t reside in bloated government forums that have generated their own industries full of mediocrity, hubris and performance. We’ve had decades of those, and look where we are? They’re part of the problem not the solution.

If we are serious about closing the gap, we must start where the gap is deepest; by overhauling the justice system, guided by those most harmed by it. That means listening, really listening, to calls that have been made for decades.

It means turning away from punishment and toward restoration and healing. It means recognising that every Aboriginal person kept out of prison is a victory not just for their community, but for the country as a whole.

Until then, the numbers will rise. And the doors will keep slamming, and everyone looses.