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Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

Australia has a large number of ethnic groups, media and the far right claims similar issues.

Using statistics on the background of prisoners, in Australia, most non-white ethnic groups have lower representation in prison compared to their percentage of the population when compared to white Australians.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime

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I wanted to verify the claim from your post/wikipedia link, as I don't believe it's true, but it's kind of a shame that wikipedia accepts a link to a 238 page report as the citation for a claim. It should at least refer to a specific page or section in the report. I don't want to hunt through hundreds of pages of this report to verify the claim. The report also doesn't have any sort of "conclusions" section so there's no quick way to even verify that the report is saying what they claim it's saying, let alone find the data behind the claim.

However, I did a quick search for every sentence containing the word Australia, and found nothing that seemed to back up the claim.

This definitely wasn't true when I was researching during university (~2005). That was obviously a long time ago, so it's very plausible that things have changed. However, I'd want to see some very well-vetted data to believe it.

According to this statistic https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411761/australia-share-... Indigenous Australians are significantly overrepresented in the prison population. As of 2022, Indigenous Australians made up 31.8% of the prison population, despite constituting only about 3.3% of the total population. Because of this massive overrepresentation, it might well be that other non-white ethnic groups are underrepresented. It's statistic and doesn't tell why one minority ends up in jail so often.

"African (predominantly South Sudanese) youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria's youth population."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-25/racial-profiling-conc...

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