Penal Culture and Hyperincarceration by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Crimes & Criminals, Criminology
ISBN: 9781317082651
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

New Penal Subjects: Asylum Seekers, Unsavoury Characters and Terrorists

If Balund-a is notable, it is for its character as a new type of institution, a pre-prison for ‘offenders’ in a pre-sentence limbo, volunteering themselves into custody and working their way through a penal regime that is not designed for punishment at all. Yet far from being a curiosity in the contemporary Australian penal environment, Balund-a stands as but one element in a wholesale refashioning of the penal domain. The pre-sentence offenders at Balunda-a are joined in this new field of penality by sex offenders subject to post-sentence detention, asylum seekers subject to mandatory immigration detention and terrorists, or indeed even terror suspects, subject to a range of civil and penal controls. Each of these reflects an extension of imprisoning rationalities beyond the traditional boundaries of criminal justice and into a twilight zone straddling the divide of civil and criminal law. At the heart of these strategies is a new doctrine of prevention, precaution or anticipation: an attempt to pre-empt various socially negative outcomes by resort to strategies of incapacitation and restraint upon civil liberties. Termed the precautionary principle, this doctrine has origins in environmentalism (Furedi 2002) but in recent years has been extended to international law (Trouwborst 2002), public health (Sunstein 2007), terrorism (Goldsmith 2008) and criminal dangerousness (Hebenton and Seddon 2009). It aims to face down the problem of indeterminate events and potentially incalculable risks by acting upon threats in a decisive manner.

The precautionary principle has quite radically altered the face of imprisonment in Australia. There is a long history of non-penal involuntary detention in modern Australia, as noted by Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange in their examination of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, a policy that while existing since at least the early 1990s has been significantly expanded and politicised in recent years. They propose that ‘[c]urrent detention policies toward on-shore refugee claimants in Australia were foreshadowed in the history of quarantine confinement and in the wartime policies of enemy alien internment’ (Bashford and Strange 2002: 510). Moreover, they link each of these forms of involuntary detention with public debate and discourse ‘circling around questions of citizenship, security, alien-ness, unfreedom and national security’ (2002: 510). Thus, in addition to desensitisation to the awfulness of imprisonment that will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, dealing with the emergence of the prison as a desirable community asset, we begin to see here linkages between an intersecting set of discourses that connect penality with a much broader set of community concerns and anxieties.

More will be said about the linkages between asylum detention and the revalorisation of the prison in a moment. We may begin, however, by noting the limited and rather stable place of indefinite penal detention in the modern use of the prison in Australia. Indefinite detention schemes were developed in most Australian jurisdictions around the turn of the twentieth century and were modelled largely upon NSW’s Habitual Criminals Act 1905. Mid-century anxieties about psychopathic and habitual offenders

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