Penal diversity within Australia
| Author | Rick Sarre,Hilde Tubex,David Brown,Karen Gelb,Arie Freiberg |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474515590891 |
| Published date | 01 July 2015 |
| Date | 01 July 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2015, Vol. 17(3) 345–373
! The Author(s) 2015
Penal diversity within
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Australia
DOI: 10.1177/1462474515590891
pun.sagepub.com
Hilde Tubex
The University of Western Australia, Australia
David Brown
Emeritus Professor, University of New South Wales, Australia
Arie Freiberg
Emeritus Professor, Monash University, Australia
Karen Gelb
University of Western Sydney, Australia
Rick Sarre
University of South Australia, Australia
Abstract
In this article, we start from internationally developed models explaining growing puni-
tiveness and increasing imprisonment rates, to analyse the penal situation within
Australia. While the eight Australian jurisdictions share many of the characteristics
that have been identified as being important determinants of the size of the prison
population, local features of these societies result in significant differences in punish-
ment. The aim of the article is to describe the main drivers of penal policy in four
Australian states (New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia).
Specific attention will be paid to the situation of Indigenous peoples and the impact of
the country’s colonial history. It will be argued that the explanatory models can explain
the trend in the Australian imprisonment rates, but not the different levels between
these rates.
Keywords
Australia, imprisonment rates, Indigenous overrepresentation, penal policy
Corresponding author:
Hilde Tubex, Faculty of Law M253, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley 6009,
Western Australia.
Email: Hilde.Tubex@uwa.edu.au
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Punishment & Society 17(3)
Introduction
The criminological literature on punitiveness, which has sought to explain increas-
ing imprisonment rates since the 1980s, has shifted its focus from social and
economic explanatory models that are global in scale towards more local analyses,
focusing on aspects of local cultures, traditions and values. One of the reasons for
this development is a wish to explore the exceptions to the rules: either countries
deviating from the leading narrative (Green, 2008; Pratt and Eriksson, 2013) or
local/interstate differences in imprisonment rates. Differences within federal states
have been revealed in the USA (Barker, 2006; Beckett and Western, 2001), Canada
(Webster and Doob, 2011) and Australia (Cunneen et al., 2013).
In most macro-level comparative analyses of recent penal evolution, Australia is
seen as following to a certain extent the punitive approach of the USA, along the
lines of other Anglo-Saxon common law countries. In reality, the penal situation
within Australia is much more varied and diverse. Australia’s national imprison-
ment rate of 186 per 100,000 adult population1 (Australian Bureau of Statistics,
2014b) masks wide internal disparities. Australia comprises eight independent jur-
isdictions with very different penal cultures, illustrated in the variety of imprison-
ment rates ranging from 130 (Australian Capital Territory) and 134 (Victoria) to
265 (Western Australia) and up to 829 (Northern Territory).
In this respect, Australia is an ideal penal laboratory: while all of these jurisdic-
tions share many of those characteristics identified as important determinants of
growing prison populations, local factors result in significant differences in both
levels and distribution of punishment. In this article we present a case study of four
Australian jurisdictions as representative of the variety of Australian penal cul-
tures: New South Wales (NSW), Victoria, South Australia (SA) and Western
Australia (WA). We discuss changes in law and policy which have influenced the
size of the prison population since the 1970s and 1980s, identifying the most
important drivers operating in each state and how they affect the prison popula-
tion. We distinguish between explanations for imprisonment rate trends and
imprisonment rate levels – an important distinction, as all four jurisdictions present
the same upward trend in their imprisonment rates over the period described, but,
as will be illustrated below, the level of their imprisonment rates – as in their
numbers per 100,000 of the adult population – significantly differs. Therefore, we
will argue that existing explanatory models that use imprisonment rates as a proxy
for punitiveness are valid only when accounting for interjurisdictional differences in
the direction of imprisonment rates, but not for their different levels.
The Australian penal landscape
Before turning to the jurisdictional differences, we first provide some background
on the penal context in Australia.
From Figure 1, we can see that imprisonment rates in Australian jurisdictions
have been increasing since the beginning of the 1980s, a trend which reflects similar
developments in most western countries. What is remarkable is that they follow the
Tubex et al.
347
300
250
NSW
200
populaon
Vic
adult 150
Qld
SA
100,000 100
WA
Tas
50
Rate per
Aust av.
0
70
72
74
76
78
80
82
84
86
88
90
92
94
96
98
00
02
04
06
08
10
12
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
2014
Figure 1. Crude imprisonment rates—Australian States.
Note: For reasons of clarity, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory are
not included in this figure.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2014b) and Australian Prison Project.
same upward trend, but at significantly different levels. The available data show a
pattern that is both stable and longstanding, stretching as far back as the 1880s in
the case of Victoria and NSW (Freiberg and Ross, 1999). The profile of the prison
population varies between states and territories, reflecting demographic differences
– more particularly the age structure and the percentage of Indigenous2 people – as
well as different punishment practices – reflected in the frequency of use of impris-
onment and remand – as well as the average length of both. However, on a national
level, serious crime rates have been falling for more than a decade, as did victim-
isation rates, confirming the relative independence between crime and imprison-
ment rates. Different sentencing patterns are therefore more an expression of the
penal culture, and in this respect, different penal cultures, as they can be explained
by differences in crime and victimisation in the jurisdictions concerned (Cunneen
et al., 2013). Before getting into this in more detail, we discuss the theoretical
framework from which we start our analysis.
Theoretical background
Over time, various (global) models have been developed to explain differences and
trends in punitiveness, most often as measured by the imprisonment rate. Much of
the initial debate was generated by the influential and thought-provoking account
of David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001). According to Garland, rising
imprisonment rates reflected a changing penal culture dominated by the insecurities
of ‘late modernity’ and by political responses to the economic, social and cultural
changes that came with it, and which had a significant impact on crime and welfare.
For Garland, it is the combination of political neo-liberalism and neo-
conservatism, as played out in the USA and UK, that was the key driver, however,
348
Punishment & Society 17(3)
acting within a broader context of social and cultural conditions. This is in contrast
with Wacquant (2009) who sees the ‘punitive state’ as the result of an explicit neo-
liberal political project, replacing the welfare state with a ‘workfare state’. This
analysis is again framed in a mainly US context. Of relevance from our perspective
is the global impact both authors attribute to these explanatory variables.
However, as has been demonstrated since, other countries – including Anglo-
Saxon countries which share a lot of the characteristics described by Garland
and Wacquant – have only followed the example of US ‘penal exceptionalism’ to
a limited extent (Pratt, 2011; Tonry, 2007; Webster and Doob, 2011). We will
investigate this divergence from an Australian perspective below.
In an attempt to categorise the diversity of penal cultures, Cavadino and
Dignan (2006) develop a typology in which they divide 12 countries into four
family groups, according to their different welfare models, based on the classic
work of Esping-Andersen (1990) on the political economies of the welfare state.
They reach the conclusion that it is mainly neo-liberal political economies that
are subject to the growing punitiveness expressed in increasing imprisonment
rates. According to Cavadino and Dignan (2006), while Australia belongs to
the group of neo-liberal political economies, its social-democratic roots, which
provided generous welfare provisions until the late 1970s, protected it from the
punitiveness associated with others in the neo-liberal category. As O’Malley
(2002: 217) argued earlier, the Australian alliance between neo-liberalism and
social-democratic politics shielded the country from, for instance, the ‘categorical
exclusion’ seen in the US far more conservative version of neo-liberalism. As a
result, the welfare model in Australia has not been fully dismantled but rationa-
lised and now requires an active involvement of welfare subjects. In respect to
criminal punishment, corrections have been ‘managerialised’ and, to a certain
extent, privatised (O’Malley, 2002). Of relevance for our discussion is the fact
that, as Beckett and Western (2001) demonstrated in the USA, welfare investment
can vary...
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