The Great Shoe Store Robbery1

Abstract

This article contributes to the significant debate on the effects of the Australian criminal justice system on Aborigines and in particular Aboriginal youth. This debate fed into nation‐wide concern over an ever increasing number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, recently culminating in the Federal Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Through the use of case studies and other ethnographic data drawn from investigations in the country town of Port Augusta, South Australia, the author illustrates how the agents of the legal and welfare systems in this state operate to present a view of Aboriginal juvenile crime as a normal response to these children's social environment and social conditioning. This process in turn, it is argued, reinforces and legitimates Aboriginal juvenile crime and contributes to its continuance, and the subsequent over‐representation of Aboriginal youths at all stages of the juvenile justice system. Yet it is forcefully pointed out that Aboriginal children are not passive victims of the legal and welfare systems. Rather, they form their own interpretations of these systems and their ‘criminal’ activities are often attempts at defiance and capturing some form of control of their own lives in the face of a legal/welfare system seeking to impose control over them. Unfortunately, it is these very activities which return Aboriginal children to the legal and welfare systems they act against.

A Further Assessment of “Circle Theory” for Geographic Psychological Profiling

“…Additionally, several commentators (e.g. Hutchings, 1993;Tyler, 1998) have suggested that the commission of these crimes by Australian aborigines may be governed by sociocultural and other considerations that are not typically observed in the non-Aborigine population. In many Australian rural towns, for example, disadvantaged Aborigines live on the fringe of the town and therefore might be expected to show a commuter offence pattern more commonly than do other Australian burglars.…”

Paint on their lips

“…Their futility, as they increase the levels of state surveillance over the young people and reincorporate them into the folds of the legal-welfare structures they resist, becomes apparent to the young people whose attempts at agency exact a heavy toll and (at least in this case) attempt to generate legitimate means to refute state control (Hutchings, 1993: The panoptic ways of imposing disciplinary norms over deviant populations proliferate beyond the punitive and repressive police gaze described earlier and, for the young people, not all the attention attracted by their outrageous behaviour is negative. A host of 'caring' agencies surveil the park daily, providing a wide range of health and welfare services.…”

Tunnel Vision: Part Two—Explaining Australian anthropology's conservatism

“…In the 1980s younger anthropologists began to follow Beckett () by recording rural southern Aborigines’ lively responses and commentary on their stigmatised identities, revealing perceptive, satirical anti‐colonial practices (Morris , ; Carter ; Cowlishaw ; Hutchings ). But such ethnographies are not common.…”