Publications

In 1991, the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) was published in response to the growing concern surrounding the number of Indigenous deaths in custody. The University of Queensland Deaths in Custody Project was established in January 2016, almost 25 years after the publication of the Royal Commission report.

The Law School, in partnership with Sisters Inside Inc, committed to a large-scale public interest research project to keep a watching brief on deaths in custody across the country, and to report regularly on the circumstances of their occurrence, and the recommendations for reform made by the coroners. 

Our project now runs out of Prisoners’ Legal Service (Qld). Since 2016, teams of law students have worked on this project pro bono, for no academic credit or reward. Between them, they have read and analysed more than 1,000 publicly available coroners' inquest findings on deaths in custody across Australia. Not all deaths in custody are publicly reported on, so the project is necessarily limited to deaths in custody for which a coroner’s report is publicly available. 

The Deaths in Custody Project website launched on 1 August 2018. Through our website, coroners' findings on deaths in custody can be searched for, and links to the fulltext decisions can be accessed. The Law School commits to maintaining this database, to shine a light on the circumstances in which deaths in custody occur, and the action that is, and is not, being taken by governments to implement coroners' recommendations.

We have published two reports about our findings: our first report was published in 2019, our second report was published in 2023.