Aboriginal Women Imprisoned at Record Rate, Experts Warn
Senior judicial officers and advocates at the 10th Annual KWOOP Parliament Breakfast have called for urgent funding for community diversion programs as indigenous women's jail rates hit an all-time high.
Harry Taruva 
Sydney - Aboriginal women in New South Wales (NSW) are being locked up at 22 times the rate of non-Indigenous women, marking the highest level of First Nations female incarceration on record.
The figures were detailed at the 10th Annual Keeping Women Out of Prison (KWOOP) Parliamentary Breakfast at Parliament House in Sydney on Thursday, June 4, where a bipartisan coalition of politicians, judges and community legal leaders gathered to confront a worsening crisis in the state's justice system.
A key driver of the surge is the state's reliance on remand, with more than 60% of women in NSW prisons currently held without conviction while awaiting trial.
Statistics show that 52% of these women are ultimately cleared or do not receive a custodial sentence, meaning thousands are separated from their families unnecessarily for minor offences.
Addressing the breakfast, New South Wales Supreme Court Justice, Dina Yehia, called for structural changes to the penal system, drawing on her experience establishing the court's Walama List, which integrates Indigenous elders into the sentencing process.
Advocates warned that the fiscal cost of the current system is significant.
Taxpayers spend AU$180,000 annually to house a single woman in prison, alongside an additional AU$110,000 per year for every child placed into out-of-home care due to maternal separation.
"We are spending over AU$200 million a year to imprison women, most of whom are on remand or short sentences, while their children enter care," said Professor Emerita Eileen Baldry AO, Co-Chair of KWOOP.
"Because the drivers of their offending are not addressed, prison is a very expensive revolving door," she said.
Professor Baldry argued that community-based diversion initiatives, which cost as little as AU$25,000 per woman per year, consistently deliver lower reoffending rates and keep families intact.
"This is not a funding problem, it is a political will problem," she said, adding, "The solutions exist. The programs work. What we need now is the decision to invest."
The ongoing crisis has triggered what researchers term a "care-to-prison pipeline," where children traumatised by early parental incarceration are statistically far more likely to enter the youth justice system themselves.
The KWOOP coalition, funded by the Judith Neilson Foundation, has set an explicit target to halve the rate of women's imprisonment in New South Wales by 2030 through systematic legal reform and expanded housing support.
