ABSTRACT
In August 2014, six boys in isolation at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Australia’s Northern Territory were tear-gassed and dragged out of their cells after one boy managed to enter the corridor of the Behavioural Management Unit. The incident led to a television news exposé of abusive conditions in the prison and several official inquiries, generating hundreds of recommendations including increased participation of Aboriginal people and Torres Straight Islanders in correctional policy and practice. Of the young people incarcerated in Northern Territory youth detention centers, 96% are Indigenous. And yet, official reports stop short of outlining a program of decolonization, preferring to recommend the integration of Indigenous people into existing criminal legal frameworks. A decolonial abolitionist critique of settler colonialism helps to address the silence at the heart of official reports and to affirm alternative pathways of Indigenous resurgence, beyond the settler state’s rhetoric of protection and intervention.
