Indigenous incarceration rates are a national crisis that has been likened to a cancer, according to legal experts from across the nation.
The Law Council of Australia, the Australian Bar Association, and the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency met in Darwin on Friday to discuss ways to address the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in jails.
It comes more than 20 years after the landmark Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody - called because First Australians made up around 14 per cent of those in jails, despite being just 2.5 per cent of the population.
'In 2013, despite 339 recommendations, $40 million dollars, three years worth of coronial inquests ... the figure now is 26 per cent,' NT Bar Association president John Lawrence said.
'We've virtually doubled what it was 20 years ago when we then felt it was necessary to have a Royal Commission.
'We are at absolute crisis point.
'What is required now is for governments - each and every one of them - to acknowledge that that is a scandal, and secondly to undertake on behalf of the community of Australia to bring in measures which will attack this cancer.'
The conference discussed the problem with pouring money into prisons and 'tough on crime' political campaigns, and the fact that this was doing nothing to address the ballooning problem.
A communique has been released, calling for the inclusion of justice reform as a Closing the Gap initiative.
It also calls for a broader move towards justice reinvestment practices, the reconsideration of policies around prevention and early intervention, and for components of the Federal Crimes Act to be repealed to allow for the recognition of customary law.
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