Black Lives, White Law

Locked Up and Locked Out in Australia

Russell Marks

• Publisher: La Trobe University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781760642600
• eBook ISBN: 9781743822616
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

How and why Australia's legal system fails Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

'Russell Marks unravels a national tragedy. From the front line he delivers a first-rate, firsthand account of how so many First Nations people end up in jail, again and again.' --Patrick Dodson, Labor Senator for Western Australia

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts; Indigenous women are twenty-one times more likely.

Featuring vivid case studies and drawing on a deep sense of history, Black Lives, White Law explores Australia's extraordinary record of locking up First Nations people. It examines Australia's system of criminal justice -- the web of laws and courts and police and prisons -- and how that system interacts with First Nations people and communities. How is it that so many are locked up? Why have imprisonment rates increased in recent years? Is this situation fair? Almost everyone agrees that it's not. And yet it keeps getting worse.

In this groundbreaking book, Russell Marks investigates Australia's incarceration epidemic. What would happen if the institutions of Australian justice received the same scrutiny to which they routinely subject Indigenous Australians?

'How should we tell the story of Indigenous incarceration in Australia? Only part of it is in the numbers. And we can't get very far by looking at the crimes that see Indigenous offenders punished by courts and sentenced to prison … To really grapple with the problem of Indigenous incarceration requires us to accept the possibility that there might be another way. That the current state of affairs -- where entire families sometimes spend time behind bars -- is not inevitable.' --Russell Marks

Shortlisted, Australian Political Book of the Year 2023
Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2023

'This passionate, timely book shines a critical light on First Nations' incarceration rates in Australia, bringing history into the present with a sense of urgency and purpose... Powerfully interventionist while avoiding polemic, this book reminds us that frontier violence has a present as well as a past.' --Judges' comments, Prime Minister's Literary Awards

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The mass incarceration crisis
• 1. Settlers: How the criminal law came to Australia
• 2. Sovereignty: How Aboriginal law disappeared as if by magic
• 3. Solutions: How settlers ‘solved’ their First Nations problem in different ways at different times
• 4. Winds of Change: How the First Nations tried to get settler institutions to listen
• 5. Bending: How the settler criminal justice system began to make accommodations
• 6. Backlash: How the implications of self-determination unsettled settlers
• 7. Saviours: How settler courts and governments ‘saved’ First Nations women and children from First Nations cultures – and then locked them up anyway
• 8. Incarceration: How settler justice threw up its hands and decided prison was the only answer after all
• 9. Debate: How settlers could not agree on which story to tell about Indigenous incarceration
• 10. Women: How protection isn’t working much better this time around for First Nations women
• 11. Children: How the settler justice system protects and rehabilitates Indigenous kids
• 12. Justice: Who calls it a justice system anyway?
• 13. The Defenders: Why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services are so important, and how they fail
• 14. A New Beginning: Why Settler Australia needs to acknowledge it created the problem and doesn’t have the answers
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover