ABORIGINAL JUVENILES AND THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM IN NEW

per cent of these cases the authors have identified the Aboriginality of the accused and this has allowed the first analysis of the treatment of Aboriginal children at all stages of the criminal justice system in New South Wales. The aims of this paper are: n to shine some light on the causes of over-representation of Aboriginal children in the New South Wales justice system; and n to suggest some strategies to reduce this over-representation. Background The present study has grown from a lack of comprehensive information about how the police and courts deal with young Aboriginal people. Only one study, by Gale et al. (1990), has compared the treatment of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people throughout a justice system. That report used official data to look at all young people dealt with in South Australia during the early 1980s. The study also provides important methodological considerations in the study of over-representation. The context in which the current research was developed was the fact that Aboriginal youth comprised around 25 per cent of juveniles held in New South Wales juvenile detention centres, and that it had been claimed that New South Wales had the highest rate for Aboriginal juvenile incarceration in Australia (Wootten 1989, p. 79). More recent research indicates that Western Australia exceeds New South Wales in the rate of Aboriginal juvenile detentions (Cunneen 1990, p. 15). However, the basic point concerning th