Harry Blagg

STOP in the Name of Who’s Law? Driving and the Regulation of Contested Space in Central Australia

This article emerges from a study of the incidence of Indigenous driving offending conducted by the authors in the Northern Territory (NT) from 2006 to 2010 on two central Australian communities. It demonstrates how new patterns of law enforcement, set in train by an ‘Emergency Intervention’ in 2007, ostensibly to tackle child sexual abuse and family violence, led to a dramatic increase in the criminalisation of Indigenous people for driving-related offending. We suggest that the criminalisation of driving-related offending was part of a neocolonial turn in the NT through which the state sought to discipline, normalise and incorporate as yet uncolonised, or unevenly colonised, dimensions of Indigenous domain into the Australian mainstream. In terms of methodology, we adopted a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches, blending criminal justice and policing data with insights from criminological, anthropological and postcolonial theory. We argue that running together the insights from different disciplinary traditions is necessary to tease out the nuances, ambiguities and complexities of crime control strategies, and their impact, in postcolonial contexts.

Re-imagining youth justice: Cultural Contestation in the Kimberley region of Australia since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Twenty years on from the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in Australia the picture appears bleaker than in the early 1990s. This article adopts a post-colonial stance to examine emerging Aboriginal strategies on youth justice in Western Australia that focus on building forms of Aboriginal ‘cultural capital’ and ‘community owned’ justice mechanisms on Aboriginal country as an alternative to failed strategies of incarceration and ‘community based’ justice. Aboriginal contestation, or what I call, after Edward Said, ‘contrapuntality’ increasingly takes place through subtle ‘inter-cultural’ work in various ‘engagement spaces’ in-between Aboriginal and mainstream cultures. These practices challenge mainstream government to practise what it preaches in relation to its claimed respect for Aboriginal cultural rights. The article reports on Aboriginal owned and controlled cultural processes in the Kimberley region of Western Australia that are contrapuntally challenging established ideas about the meaning of justice for Aboriginal youth.

Indefinite Detention Meets Colonial Dispossession: Indigenous Youths With Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders in a White Settler Justice System

Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a non-diagnostic umbrella term encompassing a spectrum of disorders caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. This article reports on a qualitative research project undertaken in three Indigenous communities in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, intended to develop diversionary pathways for Indigenous young people with FASD at risk of enmeshment in the justice system. Rates of FASD in some parts of the West Kimberley are comparable to the highest identified internationally. A diagnosis of FASD amplifies the chances of Indigenous youth being caught up in the justice system in Western Australia, including indefinite detention in prison if found unfit to stand trial. A fresh diversionary paradigm is required. Employing a postcolonial perspective, we explore issues surrounding law and justice intervention – and non-intervention – in the lives of Indigenous children and their families. The FASD problem cannot be uncoupled from the history of colonial settlement and the multiple traumas resulting from dispossession, nor can solving the problem be isolated from the broader task of decolonizing relationships between Indigenous people and the settler mainstream. The decolonizing process involves expanding the role of Indigenous owned and place-based processes and services embedded in Indigenous knowledge.

UN decision on Marlon Noble case: Imprisonment of an Aboriginal man with intellectual disability found unfit to stand trial in Western Australia:

On 23 September 2016, the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities found that the Australian government had breached its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The case against Australia was brought by Marlon Noble, an Aboriginal man with an intellectual disability who was charged with sexual assault but found unfit to stand trial under the Mentally Impaired Defendants Act 1996 (WA). He was imprisoned indefinitely in 2001 and has been held in civil detention in the community since 2012. This article analyses the current policy and legislative context in Western Australia on this issue and reflects on Australia’s previous responses to individual human rights complaints to UN Committees.

‘Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make’: Bare Life and the Carceral Archipelago in Colonial and Postcolonial Societies

This chapter offers a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of Australian prisons as exclusive sites of settler colonial repression. We refer to transcripts from 2016 to 2017 Royal Commission into Child Protection and Youth Detention in the Northern Territory to reveal how the brutal treatment of Indigenous children in prisons is part of the same continuum of racism that reduces Indigenous lives to ‘bare life’. Imprisonment is not an exceptional state of un-being for Indigenous people. Rather, in the colony, the exception is the norm. The rights for Indigenous people cannot be afforded individually but need to recognise and account for Indigenous dispossession, state domination and Indigenous sovereign claims. Penal abolitionism can only be meaningful within a process that decolonizes other sites of exception for Indigenous people.

Reconceptualising community justice centre evaluations – lessons from the North Liverpool experience

ABSTRACT Community justice centres (CJCs) form part of a new wave of justice innovations promising to revitalize justice practices, give hope to disadvantaged communities and transform the lives of offenders. CJCs work closely with local communities to craft bespoke justice solutions that aim to reduce crime and societal dysfunction by tackling the root causes of criminality in particular localities. The United Kingdom opened its first CJC, the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre in 2005, but after 8 years of operation it was closed down. This article critically explores the North Liverpool evaluation experience and lessons for projects elsewhere as they prove themselves as sustainable justice solutions. It contends that by partnering with local people, not only for a Centre’s operational aspects but also ‘bottom up’ appraisals, there is an opportunity to improve the quantity and reliability of data while also strengthening community ties and knowledge of the Centre’s activities. Ensuring that the community is a key part of demonstrating the success of such Centres will improve the quality of evaluations while also fortifying the Centre’s connection with the locality.

Doing Research With The Aboriginal Domain as a Non-indigenous Criminologist

Examining the relationship between mainstream criminology and what anthropologists call the ‘Aboriginal domain’, the author argues that criminological research must be decolonized and a fresh partnership created with the Indigenous domain and its systems of knowledge. Many of criminology’s feeder disciplines are attempting to decolonize theory and practice and acknowledge their complicity in sustaining White colonial privilege and in validating systemic racism. Western criminology has contributed to the creation of what Edward Said called ‘imagined geographies’ of the Aboriginal domain as dysfunctional and hopeless. The author concludes that a decolonized criminology would challenge this imaginary by adopting research methods that promote Indigenous knowledge. Indeed, locally and internationally, Indigenous organisations are devising protocols for respectful engagement with the Indigenous domain that need to underpin collaboration.

Remembering Geoff Pearson

The British criminology community has been orphaned this year. The deaths of Stan Cohen, Mary McIntosh and now Geoff Pearson have left many of us feeling bereft. Barbara Hudsons reflection on Stans career in the June 2013 issue of Criminal Justice Matters was adorned with memories of his kindness and unerring decency. For those of us fortunate to have known Geoff well and work alongside him there are clear parallels. Geoff Pearson left us a glittering legacy of scholarly works that have become embedded into the ‘common sense’ of criminological theory. Yet, Geoff himself was no lofty scholar, he was one of the most approachable and personable individuals one could wish to meet: generous with his time, interested in the views and experiences of others and a passionate advocate for the outsider.

Book Review: Susanne Karstedt and Kai-D Bussmann (eds) Social Dynamics of Crime and Control: New Theories for a World in Transition Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000. 271 pp. £20.00 (pbk) ISBN 1—84113—164—4:

oftentimes in the direction of more involvement in a greater variety of activities. As a result of changing and more fluid work schedules, the detection of prostitution by law enforcement could have been made more difficult. Thus arrests (but not necessarily illegal activity) might have declined regardless of new policing strategies or the introduction of the misdemeanor court. Perhaps most problematic is the superficial manner in which Weidner practices triangulation. Not only is his model sparse, so are his data. Many of Weidner’s findings rely on very short interviews conducted with 17 prostitutes chosen from the court hallways simply because this location was convenient to the author. Weidner further muddies the waters by mentioning that responses to two questions on a public opinion poll of Midtown residents conducted by an organization from Indiana support the findings of his research. He continues on shaky territory by including findings from an ethnographic study completed by a research team of which he was not part. We are not provided with any discussion of these latter two data collection efforts and are expected to accept their applicability without question. The weaknesses of this book are many. The literature review is inadequate. One has to wonder why Weidner chooses to consider the research on domestic violence courts and not drug courts. It would seem that the similarities between drug courts and the misdemeanor court would be greater and the discussion more relevant. Weidner’s treatment of the literature on female offending is perfunctory; and the long diatribe on the importance of feelings of ‘fairness’ or ‘justness’ of criminal justice interventions, superfluous. The treatment of the actual court interventions is minimal; its evaluation is insignificant. The end of the book leaves the reader wondering what she or he has learned about the era of declining crime rates beyond the already bandied about concept of ‘displacement’.