ALS Warns of Unprecedented Risk of First Nations Custody Deaths in NSW

The Aboriginal Legal Service NSW/ACT has warned that there’s unprecedented risk of First Nations deaths in custody in the New South Wales prison system at present, which is due to ongoing record-breaking numbers of First Peoples incarcerated in this state. And it further comes on the back of 12 Aboriginal people having died in custody in 2025, which is the highest number ever recorded.

NSW state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan announced in October 2025 that the state had reached a “profoundly distressing milestone”, which was the highest number of Aboriginal custody deaths since records commenced being taken in 1979/80. The coroner further explained that this was on the back of the NSW prisoner population having increased by 19 percent over past five years.

This warning comes in the wake of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) state custody figures for 31 December 2025 being released last week, which revealed that 34 percent of the adult prisoner population in this state is made up of Aboriginal persons, whilst in terms of youth detention, First Nations kids accounted for 56 percent of children detained in NSW.

These figures become all the more stark when considering that First Peoples only comprise around 3 percent of the entire NSW population, whilst in terms of Aboriginal kids between the ages of 10 to 17, they make up 8 percent of the entire state populace in this age bracket. And for uninitiated constituents, the idea that more Aboriginal people are being locked up in 2026 is counterintuitive.

Indigenous overincarceration

“It is absolutely shameful that NSW keeps breaking record after record when it comes to Aboriginal people forced into prison and dying in custody,” said Aboriginal Legal Service principal legal officer Nadine Miles. “We know when you force greater numbers of people into prison, you increase the risk of deaths in custody.”

“When you force young children into contact with police and courts, you increase the likelihood they will go on to reoffend and become trapped in cycles of imprisonment as adults,” the lawyer continued. “The NSW government knows this too but continues to pursue a tough-on-crime agenda instead of investing in solutions that actually work.”

The rising numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples being locked up in NSW, along with escalating deaths in the custody of either NSW police or Corrective Services NSW, are on a significant rise over the last few years, which coincides with growing racism towards First Peoples in the wake of the successful push against the Indigenous voice to parliament in October 2023.

A white nationalist campaign that commenced with the 31 August 2025 nationwide March for Australia rallies have appeared to have contributed to a violent neo-Nazi attack on First Nations sacred site Camp Sovereignty in Naarm-Melbourne and an attempted bomb attack at the 2026 Invasion rally in Boorloo-Perth, with both revealing a hardening of prejudice against First Peoples.

“Mass incarceration is causing the legal system to buckle. We are seeing increasing delays between our clients being arrested by police and being brought before a court,” Miles underscored in her 13 February 2026 statement. “People have been spending more time in police and court cells due to a shortage of beds in prisons.”

Rising rates under Minns

Speaking at an 18 January 2026 Blak Caucus rally organised by Dunghutti man Paul Silva on Gadigal land in Hyde Park North, UTS Jumbunna Institute Associate Professor Padraic Gibson asserted that NSW premier Chris Minns and the “racist government of NSW” are “presiding over the highest number of Aboriginal people behind bars in the history of this state.”

Gibson pointed to grave disparities in the number of First Peoples incarcerated in NSW compared to the non-Indigenous prisoner population, especially when considering the overall percentage both these groups comprise of the state populace. The academic too explained that March 2024 passed tough-on-bail laws have led to 72 percent of all Aboriginal children in prison being held on remand.

“Historic numbers of Aboriginal children are locked up,” Gibson continued, “Chris Minns has been questioned about this. His harsh law-and-order regime has been put in place. It is going to lead to more children locked up, says the Aboriginal Legal Service and other people working in this field. ‘That’s right’, says Chris Minns. And he is going to lock more up.”

The March 2024 laws required that 14- to 17-year-olds, who are arrested whilst on bail for committing a serious break and enter offence or a motor vehicle crime are automatically refused bail if they commit a similar offence, while a second reform, a “post and boast” offence, means any youths who commit these crimes and brags about them online, face up to 2 more years in prison.

Aboriginal Legal Service CEO Karly Warner pointed out in early 2025 that these laws targeting youth crime had resulted in 88 percent of those captured under them comprising of First Nations youth, as well as accounting for 90 percent of the teenagers locked away under the new provisions, which saw overall First Nations kids accounting for an 80 percent spike in youths bail refused and on remand.

Overincarceration by design

The developments in NSW regarding rising Indigenous incarceration numbers, along with discriminatory laws that are progressing this situation, are not isolated to this state.

The Victorian government rolled out its own crackdown on bail in 2024, whilst the coming to office of the Crisafulli government in Queensland and the Finocchiaro ministry in the Northern Territory both involve attempts to wind back the clocks to periods of harsher colonial laws in those jurisdictions and their tough on crime measures primarily focus on First Nations people.

NSW Greens MLC Sue Higginson spoke at the January Hyde Park rally marking 10 years since Dunghutti man David Dungay Junior was killed by prison guards in Long Bay Gaol, and she explained that the state Labor government has spent the last two years rolling out some of the “most draconian laws NSW has ever seen”.

Higginson set out that the NSW premier is “literally priding himself on the number of First Nations people locked up, as a measure of success”. The Greens justice spokesperson said she’d asked the NSW First Nations affairs minister David Harris about the spiking numbers of Aboriginal prisoners in this state and he told her that “things might have to get worse, before they get better”.

“The increase in First Nations young people who have been incarcerated over the last 18 months, the rate of increase has never ever been seen at that height ever before,” the NSW Greens justice spokesperson underscored, “ever in Australia-wide history.”

The shifts toward conservative governance led by both major parties over recent years have been overshadowed by global events like Israel’s wholesale genocide upon the Palestinians of Gaza and the Trump administration’s assault upon undocumented migrants, which has included Native peoples, and these developments appear intimately linked to what is occurring here.

“We now sit at over 615 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission,” Paul Silva said in addressing the Hyde Park crowd last month. “For me as a young person, it is important that not only me, but other First Nations people and non-Indigenous people realise that Aboriginal deaths in custody is one of the main forms of killing our people today in 2026.”

“This Australian government got orders 250 years ago to wipe First Nations people off the face of the Earth,” the Dunghutti man further asserted. “They do that in the forms of deaths in custody, the forced removals of our children, destruction of sacred sites, mental and healthcare negligence causing death, systematic racism causing our people to take their own lives, and the tremendous pressure of oppression in 2026.”