ABSTRACT
The news that an Aboriginal man died while in prison in Alice Springs, Australia, in June 2015 represented just the latest tragedy in a long series of Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia’s Northern Territory; indeed, another Aboriginal man from Yuendemu had died while incarcerated in Darwin just a few weeks earlier (Davidson, 2015). In the same communities where Aboriginal children were once separated from their families and confined within institutions like Darwin’s Kahlin Compound, or Retta Dixon Home, disproportionate rates of incarceration work to separate Aboriginal families once again. Yet the Northern Territory has also become known for a different sort of contemporary incarceration: the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in as many as six different detention facilities across the Territory. By 2011, the Territory’s capacity to detain over 3,200 asylum seekers made it known as the ‘Detention Capital of Australia’.
