The Second Convict Age: Explaining the Return of Mass Imprisonment in Australia

Leigh, Andrew

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3555590

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Incarceration rates in Australia rose by 130% between 1985 and 2018 despite falling crime rates across the same period, in turn driving the construction of new prison projects and the expansion of policing budgets (Leigh, 2020: 15). That this has occurred alongside the sustained weakening of the welfare state indicates the uptake of a form of post-Keynesianism carceralism that resembles, albeit in shrunken form, the policies found in the capitalist core.…”

Section: Historicizing the Current Conjuncture: Four Surplusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Extraordinary powers for extraordinary times”: A conjunctural analysis of pandemic policing, common sense, and the abolitionist horizon

Brooks,

Lorange

2023

Crime, Media, Culture

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In this paper, we offer a conjunctural analysis of policing and incarceration, examining their expansion in relation to structural economic conditions over the last 50 years and interrogating how the sudden onset of the Covid-19 pandemic enabled extraordinary growth in policing powers in the Australian jurisdictions of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC). We examine how popular support for police-led responses to crisis and fines as a common-sense solution to social problems were sought during the period that the Public Health Orders were in effect in the two states. We argue that the discursive project of naturalizing the police-led response to the pandemic—via official communications from the state governments as well as media coverage of the pandemic—attempts to further entrench a vision of law and order governance in which infrastructures of discipline and punishment are necessary and inevitable. We identify this vision as a direct barrier to abolition and a significant limit on the capacity to imagine alternative frameworks for justice. We end by considering a small archive of tweets from users in NSW and VIC published on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter (now called X) in 2020–21. We argue that this archive registers the way the common-sense status of the fine as an efficient, effective, and equitable punishment gives way to punitive fantasies about police and prisons. We read this archive alongside the broad refusal to pay Covid-related fines and the ongoing legal disputes contesting the legitimacy of their issuance, concluding by proposing that the conjunctural moment of the Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to unresolved contradictions between the naturalized logic of law and order crisis management and the potential for this logic to come undone.

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Section: Historicizing the Current Conjuncture: Four Surplusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Extraordinary powers for extraordinary times”: A conjunctural analysis of pandemic policing, common sense, and the abolitionist horizon

Brooks,

Lorange

2023

Crime, Media, Culture

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“…While incarcerated individuals and by extension their families are disproportionately disadvantaged persons throughout the world (cf. Prison Reform Trust, 2021 for United States and Leigh, 2020 for Australia), this scenario is even more extreme in developing countries (Wagner, 2018). Imprisonment is highly stigmatized and disruptive in the Indian context, and Indian families of incarcerated persons are blatantly treated with apathy and scorn (Chakrabarti, 1989; Gupta & Sukhramani, 2018; Prayas, 2002; Sukhramani & Gupta, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women at the margins: Experiences with spousal incarceration inIndia

Gupta

Arditti

2023

J of Family Theo & Revie

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Justice‐involved families in India are underserved despite concurrent challenges including inadequate penal systems and widespread poverty. Families provide emotional and financial support to incarcerated individuals—burdens that fall upon female kin who are underresourced. Women experiencing spousal incarceration in India are likely to be from marginalized sections of society, vulnerable to co‐occurring forms of oppression, making intersectional feminism a suitable theoretical framework to contextualize their lives. Through consistent interactions with the carceral institution, these women become integrated in the prison culture, experiencing secondary prisonization. Intersectional feminism helps understand variations in secondary prisonization for women inhabiting different social locations. However, this population remains understudied. We bridge the gap by building a contextualized understanding of this population using intersectional feminism, by attending to scholarship that illustrates sources of marginalization including exploitive informal work, a minoritized caste identity, and a minoritized religious identity. We offer recommendations for theory and research.

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“…Like many other Anglophone jurisdictions, Australia's prison population has increased significantly over recent decades, although it has not reached the level of ‘mass-incarceration’ of the US (cf Leigh, 2020). As in most jurisdictions (Rhine and Taxman, 2017; Robinson, 2016), there are far more Australians under some form of community sanction than in prison.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Penal diversity, penality and community sanctions in Australia

Freiberg

Bartels

2022

Punishment & Society

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This article explores Australian penal diversity, through the lens of community sanctions. We first examine what is meant by ‘community sanctions’ and suggest that the problem of definition provides one of the reasons for the dearth of comparative studies on their use, compared with prison studies. The article then examines the concept of punitiveness, ‘penal reach’ or ‘penal load’. This is followed by examination of the use of community corrections (CC) in Australia and differences between jurisdictions and over time. We consider the relationship between imprisonment and CC rates and attempt to explain these differences. Our analysis suggests there is a need to expand the notion of punitiveness, to include non-custodial sanctions. Further exploration of Australia's trends in the use of CC and interjurisdictional variation is required. However, we suggest that becoming less fixated on imprisonment, as the primary measure of punitiveness, and instead understanding how the various community sanctions operate – not as alternatives to imprisonment, but as independent sanctions appropriate to a wide range of less serious offences – may enable us to better understand the true penal impact of a jurisdiction's criminal justice system and consequently craft more effective and appropriate penal policies.

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The Second Convict Age: Explaining the Return of Mass Imprisonment in Australia

Cited by 7 publications

References 27 publications

“Extraordinary powers for extraordinary times”: A conjunctural analysis of pandemic policing, common sense, and the abolitionist horizon

“Extraordinary powers for extraordinary times”: A conjunctural analysis of pandemic policing, common sense, and the abolitionist horizon

Women at the margins: Experiences with spousal incarceration inIndia

Penal diversity, penality and community sanctions in Australia

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