AUSTRALIA SEES HIGHEST INDIGENOUS DEATHS IN CUSTODY IN 40 YEARS

hu 11 December 2025:

Australia recorded its highest number of Indigenous deaths in custody in 40 years between July 2024 and June 2025, the Australian Institute of Criminology said Wednesday.

Thirty-three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people died in custody during the period, almost double the average since 1989-90, out of a total of 113 deaths, the report said.

Indigenous deaths made up 29% of all deaths in custody, marking a 23% rise from 2023-24 and the highest proportion since 2002-03.

New South Wales recorded the highest number of Indigenous deaths in prison custody.

Natasha Ugle, whose husband, Wayne Ugle, died in Perth’s Hakea Prison in November 2023, said the rate of deaths was “terrible” and felt like “a weekly thing now”.

“I’m on the Hakea Prison Facebook page and people are messaging me and they’re saying, ‘another death in custody, another death in custody’, it’s just too much sometimes,” she said.

“The first couple of months after Wayne passed away and there were still more deaths in custody, I just couldn’t handle it any more. I was just too emotional because you know, nothing has changed. We go and we do all these rallies, we do all these marches, we stand up there, we speak for our people, we try and get change and ask for change but nothing happens.”

Noongar man Wayne Ugle died in custody after being arrested by police and taken to Hakea prison in Perth in November 2023. Photograph: Natasha Ugle

Natasha and her husband had been married for more than 25 years, and had three biological children and six foster children. The coroner is yet to hold an inquest into his death.

Natasha Ugle said it felt like the words of Indigenous families were falling on deaf ears.

“No one listens and no one cares,” she said. “Something really needs to be changed because we are still getting deaths, after deaths, after deaths.”

The CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Nerita Waight, said many of the deaths were preventable, and that “racist policing practices and harmful systems built on oppression” continued to fail First Nations families and communities.

“It is an extremely painful truth that right now we are experiencing the highest rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody in over four decades,” Waight said. “The reality is that police and prison custody is not a safe place for Aboriginal people. This is what the royal commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody found in 1991.”

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Megan Krakouer, a Menang Noongar woman and social justice advocate, said the high number of deaths were a “predictable outcome of governments failing to provide proper support, oversight, and culturally informed services for First Nations people”.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3.8% of Australia’s population but more than one-third of the country’s prisoners, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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