Australia's National Research and Knowledge Centre on Crime and Justice Indigenous Disparity in Lower Court Imprisonment Decisions: a Study of Two Australian Jurisdictions, 1998 to 2008 Explaining Disparity in the Imprisonment Sentencing Decision

There are few systematic investigations of lower court sentencing, even though this is where the majority of offenders are sentenced and baseline statistics show Indigenous people receive relatively harsher sanctions than non-Indigenous offenders (in New South Wales, see Baker 2001; in South Australia, see Castle & Barnett 2000). This paper explores the probability of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous defendants in the lower courts of South Australia and New South Wales receiving a prison sentence over time. Its primary aim is to identify whether a statistical relationship exists between Indigenous status and imprisonment after controlling for other factors known to impact sentencing decisions (such as current and past criminality).