A/HRC/36/46/Add.2 65. The Special Rapporteur was informed that certain Aboriginal women’s organizations are in favour of income management measures as they consider that these have improved the safety of women and children as well as food security. L. Incarceration and the administration of justice 66. The administration of justice and detention practices were raised as key concerns during the country visit. The extraordinarily high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, including women and children, is a major human rights concern. While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up only 3 per cent of the total population, they constitute 27 per cent of the national prison population. More than half of the children in detention are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. In some detention facilities, such as in the Northern Territory and in the Cleveland Youth Detention Centre in Queensland, indigenous children constitute an astonishing 90 per cent of the detainees, which prima facie raises concerns over racial discrimination in the administration of justice. 67. The proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continues to rise and is expected to reach 50 per cent of the overall prison population by 2020. Despite the comprehensive recommendations issued to address incarceration rates over 25 years ago in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, the indigenous prison population has on the contrary doubled during that period. The reasons for the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian prisons are manifold. Imprisonment is the end result of years of dispossession, discrimination and intergenerational trauma faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. It is also caused by the lack of political will to address the situation, despite that key measures for improvement have been repeatedly identified by a string of national and state inquiries, royal commissions, coroners’ reports and international human rights monitoring mechanisms. 68. Current laws and policies continue to contribute to the swift escalation in the incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Though not explicitly targeted at those populations, their disproportionate impact is clear. For instance, paperless arrests laws in the Northern Territory, which allow the police to detain a person for several hours if they have committed or are suspected to have committed a minor offence, have led to a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous persons in police custody. Bail laws and policies have become more restrictive in most States and Territories and have led to a significant increase in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders held on remand. Longstanding calls for the abolishment of mandatory sentencing laws, notably in Western Australia, continue to be ignored. The current inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission into the Incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples should help identify laws that need to be amended to reduce such incarceration, and the Government must act on those laws to impede this national crisis, which has devastating effects on the indigenous community. 69. Funding for legal services for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders has been reduced since 2015, which has had a significant impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, who have higher rates of unmet legal needs, owing inter alia to not speaking English as their first language and having lower literacy skills. High-quality and culturally competent legal assistance services are critical to ensure access to justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and to reduce imprisonment. The Special Rapporteur is pleased to learn, that subsequent to her visit, federal funding cuts for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander legal services were reversed in May 2017. A national mapping of unmet legal needs has however yet to be undertaken, a step that is essential in order to overcome the persistent disadvantage and to address effectively incarceration rates. 70. Since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, there have been over 340 deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in detention. Certain deaths have been caused by the negligence of the staff responsible for the care of the person in custody. This was the case for Ms. Dhu, a 22-year-old indigenous woman who died within 48 hours of being taken into police custody in Western Australia in August 2014. She 12