In the foreword for a study we published last year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote that "At today's high incarceration rates, continuing to incarcerate more people has almost no effect on reducing crime".
The U.S. has an extraordinarily high incarceration rate, with 1 out of every 31 adults incarcerated, on parole or on probation.
It's a simple equation: communities with high incarceration rates have fewer votes to cast.
By now the Australian public is broadly aware that Aboriginal communities are severely impacted by issues that contribute to high incarceration rates, and more specifically the high incarceration rates of Indigenous children, particularly in the Northern Territory.
"Most of us who are involved in this are very much in favor of high incarceration of serious habitual offenders.
This does nothing to reduce California's disproportionately high incarceration rates and could just transfer the overcrowding to local jails.
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.
She said the work camp and other plans would support low-risk Indigenous inmates, and the NT government was working to address high incarceration rates.
On the one hand, high incarceration rates, poor health, disproportionate suicide rates, and low education outcomes are, in many people's minds, our fault and synonymous with being Aboriginal.
The report's real significance lies in its further contention that this disparity in perceptions contributes to our astonishingly high incarceration rate, the highest in the world.
It is less that they are consciously seeking to subordinate racial minorities than that they fail to treat the negative consequences of high incarceration rates as their problem.
