While this mirrors the trend around Australia, the additional bad news is the rate of increase in imprisonment of Indigenous people is twice as great as the national average.

How can that be, in this prosperous city-state? It is, and it's a national tragedy, one that demands remedial action.

It's often said the national capital has a conundrum – the apparent incongruity of people living in poverty in the city with the highest disposable household income in the nation.

And the situation is worse for many of the Indigenous residents, as one result of the continent's original inhabitants suffering from generations of dispossession and discrimination,

"The raw statistics in relation to the incidence of Indigenous disadvantage in Canberra really are very, very stark," former ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope says.

"When one looks across the board at a whole range of social indicators in relation to the status of that particular community, there are some stark, indeed dramatic, and exceedingly worrying sets of statistics.

"The statistics regarding Indigenous disadvantage in Canberra are horrendous and we as a community need to face up to that, recognise it and address it."

He says many people do not even know more than 6000 Aboriginal people live in Canberra.

When he was chief minister, he pushed hard to build the Alexander Maconochie Centre which opened in March 2009. It was an expensive project because he insisted on high standards for the 300-bed facility. About 40 per cent of the prisoners, including all female prisoners, live in cottages with separate bedrooms.

Later the government decided to build a new 56-cell block with 80 beds and a 30-bed special care centre for detainees requiring intensive support.

Now Stanhope is seriously disturbed by the trends emerging from the jail. He highlighted his concerns at an event at Old Parliament House convened jointly by the ANU and the University of Canberra.

The topic of the justice reinvestment forum was, "Alternatives to gaol in the ACT". Along with Stanhope, the speakers were Professor Mick Dodson and Canberra Times columnist Jack Waterford.

Justice reinvestment is a way of redirecting some of the money spent on prisons, into areas such as health and social interventions that can help keep people away from crime.

Stanhope mused that, as Chief Minister, he believed he was achieving a good outcome by developing the most human rights compliant prison in the world.

"Having built the prison, we now see the ACT imprisoning Canberrans at a faster rate than any other jurisdiction around Australia," he told the audience of about 100 people, gathered in the historic members' dining room.

"We are increasing the real rate of imprisonment in the ACT faster than any other state ... the numbers are very disturbing."

Stanhope referenced work by Associate Professor Lorana Bartels from the University of Canberra.

In a paper published on The Conversation this year, she says the ACT has the highest proportion of prisoners previously imprisoned – 72 per cent, compared with the national average of 59 per cent – but has the highest proportion of prisoners in education – 83 per cent, compared with a national average of just 33 per cent.

She reports the prison filled rapidly but the imprisonment rate was 114 per 100,000, well below the national rate of 190.

"However, the ACT imprisonment rate has risen 25 per cent over the last two years, compared with a national increase of 12 per cent," she says.

"Over this time, the number of ACT prisoners increased by 28 per cent, compared with a national increase of 16 per cent. Notably, the number of Indigenous prisoners increased by 47 per cent, compared with 17 per cent nationally."

After the paper was published, the ACT auditor-general released a report that said the Alexander Maconochie Centre's planning for rehabilitation was ineffective. The report prompted an editorial in The Canberra Times that described the lack of rehabilitation framework as "another failure of sizeable proportion".

Stanhope says the most recent census determined 6200 people in the ACT identified as Indigenous.

The disturbing question he posed to the audience at Old Parliament House was – how it is, from a base of 1.7 per cent of the ACT population, around 25 per cent of the inmates of the ACT jail are Indigenous?

And it gets worse than that. In the past two weeks, the proportion of Aboriginal women in the jail has spiked to 50 per cent, he said.

Stanhope now has two part-time jobs – at the University of Canberra and the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service.

While the ACT has Australia's lowest incarceration rates, Stanhope emphasises he is concerned at the rate of increase, as well as the proportion of prisoners who are Indigenous.

"In any discussion around justice or the justice system or incarceration or the operation of the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the first and most outstanding and remarkable statistic is that Aboriginal people at the moment constitute somewhere in the order of 28 per cent of all people currently detained at the AMC and that is from a base population of 6000 or indeed 1.7 per cent of the Canberra community," he says.

"That is a level of over-representation of incarceration that is equivalent to or even slightly higher than the national average.

"Canberra is an exceedingly prosperous city state [yet] we are at or above the national average in relation to the average rate of Indigenous incarceration."

Stanhope says the number of inmates given to him at Winnunga Nimmityjah are higher than government roll calls because not all Indigenous people want to be identified as such.

He says many Indigenous children are not completing secondary school and are becoming involved with the criminal justice system and being exposed to substance abuse at an early age.

Without programs to deal with the underlying issues, some Aboriginal people are on a revolving door of offending and repeat offending.

"It's led to this situation where, across the whole of Australia, one quarter of all prisoners are Aboriginal – it's a national tragedy and a national disgrace," he says.

Speaking after the forum, Stanhope says the same factors are in play in Canberra as across the nation.

"It's so incongruous – I don't know how you would measure this but I imagine on a pro rata household disposable income basis, Canberra is probably one of the most prosperous cities in the world," he says.

"What we've very successfully done in Canberra, as a result of our newness and design and relative levels of prosperity, is disguise poverty and disadvantage extremely well.

"We've managed to avoid ghettoising of poverty, we don't have any particularly large areas of dense population of disadvantage or poverty, we've pepper and salted it, we've scattered it throughout the suburbs so it's not in our face.

"But in Canberra there is a very large cohort of people living in poverty – we don't see them, but it's almost certain that we have somewhere in the same ratio as the rest of Australia of people living in poverty, around 8 per cent.

"For us, that 8 per cent of people living in poverty translates into about 30,000 people living in poverty."

Nationally, the levels of chronic illness within the Aboriginal community are on average four times worse than in the non-Aboriginal community, he says.

"In some specific areas, they are far worse than that, such as in relation to renal or kidney issues and diabetes," he says.

"But generally, in relation to primary care, an Aboriginal person has four times the level of issues or severity of issues than non-Aboriginals.

"In relation to specific issues such as crime and child removal and educational attainment and access to employment, the numbers are dire for a group of people within the Aboriginal community."

Stanhope says the best hope of reducing Indigenous disadvantage is by consulting Aboriginal people about what needs to be done.

He nominates the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service as a "stellar" example.

"It is a stand-out success of an Aboriginal-managed health service dealing with the health needs of its community," he says.

To overcome Indigenous disadvantage, the government must first consult the Aboriginal community and the response must be led by Aboriginal people, Stanhope says.

"Aboriginal people in need respond far better to Aboriginal people that are seeking to meet that need than they do to non-Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal organisations," he says.

"That's why you have Aboriginal health services all over Australia, like Winnunga Nimmityjah.

"We need a Closing the Gap approach to the justice system and Indigenous offending and it needs to be Aboriginal informed and led and managed by Aboriginal organisations.

"That's how we're going to make the most progress in actually reducing crime and offending and allowing Aboriginal people to participate in society."

Stanhope says the presence of a significant Aboriginal middle classs in Canberra means it is important not to generalise.

"There is a very successful Aboriginal middle-class, most particularly public servants and people working within Aboriginal focused organisations, in good steady high-paying jobs, with the children succeeding at school," he says.

"But having said that, there is still a very large proportion of the 6000 Aboriginal people in Canberra who are living in extremely disadvantaged circumstances.

"When I say to people, 'do you know there are six and a half thousand Aboriginal people in Canberra?', people are stunned to hear that.

"People often say, 'we don't have Aboriginals in Canberra' – but there are more than 6000 Aboriginals living in Canberra.

"There is not a single set of social indicators that you would care to go to that don't indicate that Aboriginal people are among the most disadvantaged people in Canberra and they're doing it as tough here as anywhere else in Australia."

Last week the "change the record coalition" called for federal, state and territory governments to work together on reducing the soaring Aboriginal imprisonment rates.

It pointed out that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are currently 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence than non-Indigenous women.

@rosspeakeCT