In March 2012 it will be twenty-one years since the release of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The report found that while Aboriginal deaths in custody did not happen at a higher rate than non-Aboriginal deaths in custody, the rate of imprisonment was many times higher. Western Australia’s Indigenous incarceration rate remains the highest in the country, where an Indigenous person is 23 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Indigenous person. Any consideration of overcrowding in prisons in Western Australia needs to be considered in this context.

Given the vast size of Western Australia (30 per cent of the Australian continent) many people from remote communities are gaoled thousands of kilometres from home. In
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