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School House to Big House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2018

Grace O'Brien  and
Michelle Trudgett
Grace O'Brien*
Affiliation:
Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales2007, Australia
Michelle Trudgett
Affiliation:
Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales2007, Australia
*
address for correspondence: Grace O'Brien, Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales2007, Australia. Email: Grace.M.OBrien@student.uts.edu.au.
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Abstract

In 1991, the Australian Government released the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report. Of the 339 recommendations, Recommendation 62 identified that there was an alarming over-representation of Indigenous youth in contact with the criminal justice system. The report called for immediate action by governments to develop strategies that would urgently reduce retention rates of Indigenous youth within the prison system. Analysis of the literature indicates that almost three decades after the release of this report, the high numbers of Indigenous youth who are incarcerated, or who have come into contact with the juvenile justice system remains the same. Although there is a good deal of literature investigating the criminological characteristics of this phenomena; there is a substantial gap in the literature surrounding the educational exclusion of young Indigenous males from the formal education system. This paper focusses specifically on the literature surrounding student exclusion from state schools and how this may provide some insight into the subsequent over-representation of young Indigenous males within the Queensland juvenile justice system.

Keywords

educationexclusionIndigenous malesjuvenile detention
Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , August 2020 , pp. 98 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018

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