Rethinking Community Sanctions: Social Justice and Penal Control

Rethinking Community Sanctions: Social Justice and Penal Control redresses the invisibility of community sanctions in a popular imaginary dominated by the prison, resulting in their being seen as ‘not prison’, ‘not punishment’, a ‘let off’, or expression of mercy. Based on insights from interviews with key participants in 3 Australian jurisdictions, case studies of selected programmes and policies, and the international literature, the authors focus on the effects of community sanctions among groups vulnerable to penal control: First Nations peoples, women, and those with disabilities, along with those at the intersections of these groups. Arguing that developing a better, more democratic politics around community sanctions requires coming to terms with the wider carceral web in which vulnerable groups are ensnared, they demonstrate the importance of connecting criminal legal system struggles with broader movements for community control, self-determination, and sovereignty.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Rethinking Community Sanctions Chapter 2. Convergence and Divergence in Community Sanctions Policies Chapter 3. Legal Processes and Community Sanctions Chapter 4. Public Opinion, Signal Crimes and Narrowing 'Experiential Distance' Chapter 5. ‘Less Than More Likely Than Not’: Risk Mentalities, Technologies and Practices Chapter 6. Whither Rehabilitation? Chapter 7. Groups Vulnerable to Penal Control Chapter 8. Politics and Democracy: Opening up the Community Sanctions Landscape

About the Author :
Julie Stubbs is Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, Australia. Sophie Russell is Research Associate for the Rethinking Community Sanctions Project at UNSW Sydney and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Eileen Baldry is Professor of Criminology at UNSW Sydney, Australia. David Brown is Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, Australia. Chris Cunneen is Professor of Criminology, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Melanie Schwartz is Associate Professor and Deputy Dean (Education) at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Review :
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. 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. 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. 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.