When too many young Aboriginal men come to see prison as a normal stage of growing up, the question is not only what has gone wrong with them – but what has happened to the society around them.
An Aboriginal prisoner once leaned towards me with a mischievous smile and whispered, “We’re Australia’s Uyghurs. Tucked away here, out of sight, out of mind.” His remark has stayed with me, not because of the comparison itself, but because it revealed how clearly many inmates understand the contradictions of the society that imprisons them.
The numbers help explain why his provocative comparison lingered. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up just under 4 per cent of Australia’s population, yet they account for 37 per cent of the nation’s prisoners and are imprisoned at around 15 times the rate of other Australians.
“Komla! Komla! Come and meet my missus!”
I was hurrying through a Cairns shopping centre when a young Aboriginal man called my name and hurried over with his partner.
“This is Komla,” he said proudly. “I’ve been telling you about him.”
Then he smiled.
“And this is my missus. We’re family again. Our little boy’s happy. Things are really going good.”
It had been more than two years since we had seen each other, yet I immediately remembered the goal he had written for himself: to reunite with my family and become the best dad I can be.
We had first met inside Lotus Glen Correctional Centre, where Father Les Baird and I were facilitating Family Wellbeing. Seeing him now, not as a prisoner but simply as a proud partner and father, reminded me how unpredictable change can be. It also carried me back more than three decades to another moment when Australia overturned assumptions I had brought with me from Ghana.
In 1993, soon after arriving in Central Australia, my colleague Jayne Schofield and I were teaching an Aboriginal Health Worker course at Anyinginyi Congress in Tennant Creek. Attendance was excellent until Thursday, when only seven of our 20 students appeared.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“It’s court day.”
I assumed they meant a community event. Instead, I learned that several students were appearing in court while others had gone as witnesses or to support relatives.
The explanation stunned me. In the village where I grew up in Ghana, despite poverty, I could have named every person who had ever gone to prison. Even today I can still name the only boy from my class who was imprisoned. Australia was introducing me to a society where the justice system touched almost every family represented in that classroom.
Instead of continuing the course, we spent the next two days observing proceedings. The visiting magistrate, Lorraine Little, the Northern Territory’s first Aboriginal woman lawyer, left me with two enduring lessons.
The first was simple: prison should never become a normal rite of passage for young people.
The second came from her own life. As a schoolgirl she dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but a careers adviser steered her towards early childhood education. Only after moving to Papua New Guinea did she encounter Black lawyers and judges. Suddenly she could imagine herself among them. She returned determined to become what others had struggled even to imagine. It confirmed something I would later see repeatedly in my own research: possibility often precedes aspiration.
The court visit also changed our teaching. Many offences involved driving without licences, so we added an intensive driving program, enabling participants to leave with a licence wherever possible.
Nearly 30 years later, Father Les and I began facilitating Family Wellbeing at Lotus Glen. I was struck by how young many of the men were, by their humour and by the thoughtful questions they asked about Ghana.
One day a young man asked whether I had ever visited prisons there. I replied that I had not, though I knew they were overcrowded, and added that I could still name the only boy from my class who had ever gone to prison.
He leaned towards me and smiled.
“We’re Australia’s Uyghurs. Tucked away here, out of sight, out of mind.”
I have often reflected on those words. These young men were not passive subjects of the justice system. They understood the contradictions of their circumstances. Listening carefully, I often wondered how many had travelled through school with learning difficulties or other disadvantages that had never been recognised.
If prison suddenly became common among young men in my village of Botoku, people would not first ask, “Who has broken the law?” They would ask, “What has happened to us?” One question searches for individuals to blame. The other asks what has changed in a society that allows an abnormal situation to become normal.
That is why Father Les and I have continued advocating the long-term expansion of proven social and emotional programs, both as prevention in communities and rehabilitation in correctional settings. Australia has spent decades documenting Indigenous disadvantage. We now know much more about what also helps people rebuild their lives.
Family Wellbeing begins with deceptively simple questions about whether people’s physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and cultural needs are being met, and what they can do to improve them. One inmate looked up after completing the exercise and asked quietly, “Why did nobody teach us this when we were young?”
That question has stayed with me.
The challenge is no longer discovering whether such approaches can work. It is finding the resolve to invest in them at the scale the evidence now justifies.
None of this removes the need to confront the structural causes of Indigenous incarceration. But success should be measured not only by fewer prison beds, but by more people who can genuinely picture themselves living beyond them.
I often think back to that meeting in the shopping centre. The young man did not introduce himself as a former prisoner. He introduced the woman beside him as “my missus” and spoke proudly about their son. For a few moments, prison disappeared from the story. Family took its place.
Over three decades Australia has taught me many things. Perhaps the greatest is this: every society eventually normalises what it sees often enough. One responsibility of public conversation is to make the familiar strange again. When too many young people begin to regard prison as simply another stage of growing up, the question is no longer only what has gone wrong with them. It is also what has happened to the society that has learned to accept it.
Sometimes an outsider’s greatest contribution is not offering better answers. It is helping a country notice what it has quietly stopped seeing.
Komla Tsey
Komla Tsey is a Ghanaian–Australian writer, retired Professor of Education for Social Sustainability, and part-time Professorial Research Fellow at the Jawun Research Institute, Central Queensland University. His writing explores education, democratic culture, identity, Indigenous empowerment, colonial legacies and the moral certainties that shape public life. His forthcoming memoir, Botoku Child, traces a journey from a small village in Ghana to universities and communities across the world, examining how inherited beliefs, curiosity and lived experience shape both personal lives and democratic societies.