Analysing over 500,000 bail decisions, BOCSAR found that legal factors had the most effect on police and court decisions to refuse bail, including offence seriousness, concurrent charges or prior offending or imprisonment.
“This study confirms that bail decisions are overwhelmingly based on legal factors related to offending. However, it remains possible that Aboriginal people are disadvantaged in police bail decisions and that this is contributing to their overrepresentation in custody,” said BOCSAR Executive Director Jackie Fitzgerald.
“A new study is planned to determine definitively whether the Aboriginal bail result reported here is due to bias or a factor not controlled for in this research.”
“While knowledge is always a good thing, we need much more than research — we need action,” Crellin said.
ALS NSW/ACT is calling for Aboriginality to be a standalone provision within the Bail Act 2013 (NSW). This means courts and police would have to consider factors around someone’s Aboriginality previous to bail decisions.
So…one of the reasons I came to Lemmy is because I found you couldn’t have a discussion on reddit about sensitive issues in Australia because it’s full of reactionaries. Hoping it’s different here?
I’m really glad BOSCAR is studying this issue and trying to work out why there’s a disparity in bail decisions. The ALS seems taking the position that it’s due mainly to racism and are arguing for a legislative fix, which sounds like it’s designed to encourage judges to go easier on Aboriginal people, thus counteracting the bias that exists. I’ve seen other people say that Aboriginal people are less likely to be granted bail simply because they’re more likely to be repeat offenders, which naturally results in harsher treatment by the court.
BOSCAR’s data seems to be leaning towards the latter, but it sounds like they need to do more work on controlling for factors like repeat offending, so we can do a like-for-like comparison.
Either way I think it’s been clear for a long time that ‘tough on crime’ measures are a fucking disaster. What’s happening in the NT makes me despair.