Rethinking Community Sanctions

What do community sanctions look like in Australia in the 21st century? What can be done to realize their progressive potential and minimize their insidious effects? This lively, theoretically informed, empirically grounded book, written by a group of scholars with a deep knowledge of Australia’s penal system, opens up new ways of thinking about a form of sanctioning that is widely used but little understood.

-- David Garland

Drawing on the leading international literature on punishment, and further contributing to it, Rethinking Community Sanctions provides the first book-length study of community sanctions in Australia that is both comprehensive in scope and critical in nature. It redresses the profound imbalance between the critical attention devoted to the prison as a sanction and that directed at the far more common reliance on punishment and surveillance in the community, and it carefully elucidates the connections between the two. It does so with particular reference to those most vulnerable to being ensnared in the carceral dragnet. And it offers a positive alternative vision for the future of community sanctions. As much as academics should be drawn to this book, so too should lawyers, criminal justice practitioners and politicians who care about the current trajectory of the penal system.

-- Russell Hogg

This brilliant book offers the first critical analysis of community sanctions in contemporary Australia – but its contribution goes much further than that. It is the first study anywhere to properly develop a decolonizing perspective on this topic. Both by putting the present-day injustices in their proper historical context and by centering three populations who are too often marginalized in and by penal policy, practice and scholarship (indigenous people, women and people with mental health disorders and/or cognitive disabilities), this book represents a major advance in the study of probation and parole, but also in how we understand relationships between punishment, community and society more generally. Everyone who cares about those relationships should read it, digest it and use it.

-- Fergus McNeill

A compelling, comprehensive conceptual and empirical analysis of the social, political, and legal nuances of community correctional practices in Australia, this book shows how the risk episteme underpinning community sanctions is limited and has differential effects on women, people with disabilities, and racialized and Indigenous populations. The authors challenge us to reflect on the administrative and operational limits of these sanctions, binaries of community/custody, welfarist/risk, and harsh/ ‘soft’ penalties. Readers are asked to scrutinize how technological, sociopolitical, and populist rationalities reconfigure supervision, while simultaneously remaining hopeful about the potential of ‘community’ sanctions.

-- Kelly Hannah-Mo