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FLORENCE ONUS, ELDERS FOR CHANGE: We’re going to the women’s prison out at Stuart here because we are the Elders for Change, and we provide cultural and spiritual support for our women at the prison.FLORENCE ONUS: Our women go in there every week.She's taking us inside the Townsville Women's Correctional Centre just on the outskirts of town. Around 200 women are held here.BROOKE FRYER: The residential area we’re about to enter is high security.
FLORENCE ONUS: This are really good what we call a yarning cards. And when we say respect, what does that mean?BROOKE FRYER: The National Agreement on Closing the Gap aims to reduce the number of First Nations people incarcerated by at least 15 per cent by 2031.But prison numbers tell a different story.
THELMA SCHWARTZ, PRINCIPAL LEGAL OFFICER, QIFVLS: If a woman is denied bail, she will be remanded into custody, so that means she goes into prison. If she's pleading not guilty, she could be on remand for up to 12 months. We can't sentence our way out of what is going on. We need to look at different ways to respond to our community, our community needs have shifted.BROOKE FRYER: The intergenerational impact of imprisonment is something that 29-year-old Tarnika knows well.TARNIKA ROMA: She was using drugs, but I didn't know what drugs were then like, though her term was medication, like, she had to get her medication. I used to just follow around, around the streets.
BROOKE FRYER: Tom says some of the solutions were tabled in the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.Others were to uphold the right to bail, to monitor offensive language charges plus, to decriminalise public drunkenness.
First Nations Women Prison Indigenous Aboriginal Incarceration
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