Specialist Sentencing Courts for Indigenous Offenders

Abstract

<p>Indigenous Offenders in Australia, along with many other jurisdictions, are heavily over represented in the criminal justice system. As a result, specialist 'Aborginal courts' have developed both as a response to this over-representation and as a way to give the indigenous community a 'voice in the sentencing process'. Since 1999, every Australian jurisdiction ( save for Tasmanaia) has introduced their own form of specialist sentencing court for indigenous Offenders. Each has its own particular story of how and why their own versions of Aborginal courts came to fruition and to what extent indigenous people were involved in their development. there have neverthless been a limited number of studies that explore this initial development" indeed few have adopted a national perspective, with the exciting literature restricted to particular juristications. This paper thus reviews the general history of such courts in Australia and other juristications, along with their specific development in each state and Territory and the extent to wich indigenous people were involved in order to investigate a hypothesis that this involvement is casually related to the extent to which some courts can be said to have met their objectives. It also analyses and compares the different models in each jurisdication, identifies what they have in common, emphasises their diverse and localised nature and comments on their respective success or failures according to a number of measures. In doing so, it finds a nexus between the prevalence of a number of common factors and those jurisdications considered a success, likewise with those considered a failure or abondoned altogather.</p>