Still no bodies: Five years of “no body, no parole” in Queensland, Australia
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/26338076221087458 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Still no bodies: Five years
of “no body, no parole”
in Queensland, Australia
Monique Moffa, Michele Ruyters,
and Greg Stratton
Criminology & Justice Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
“No body, no parole”laws have been introduced in and expanded across Australia since 2015.
These reforms were politically premised on the notion of providing closure to victims’families
by compelling prisoners convicted of homicide offences to disclose the location of their vic-
tims’remains in order to be considered eligible to apply for parole. These laws are in oper-
ation in most states and territories across Australia despite low national numbers of reported
no body homicides. Most Australian jurisdictions do not publish parole decisions, and
Queensland is one of only two jurisdictions that require no body, no parole decisions to
be made public. This article reviews the roll-out of the “no body”laws in Queensland and
considers the potential to misuse the victims’movement for political gain. We examine the
ten published decisions made by the Parole Board Queensland under s193A of the
Corrective Services Act 2006 (Qld) to date and discuss the extent to which the legislative
aims of the reforms have been met. We argue that there is little evidence these reforms
have achieved their aims, and there is a risk that the politicization of parole regimes exploits
the victims’rights movement by offering victims’families false hope.
Keywords
Parole, populism, politics, no body, no parole, Queensland
Date received: 29 November 2021; accepted: 21 February 2022
Introduction
The threat posed comes from the political willingness to harness and manipulate public support for
the victim so as to replace considered discourse with vengeful anti-defendantism. This political
Corresponding author:
Greg Stratton, Criminology & Justice Studies, RMIT University, 411 Swanston St, Melbourne 3001, Australia.
Email: gregory.stratton@rmit.edu.au
Article
Journal of Criminology
2022, Vol. 55(2) 162–179
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/26338076221087458
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
hijacking of the victims’movement to support increasingly punitive measures –with such anti-
defendant reform heralded as pro-victim when it does little, if anything, to assist his [sic] plight
–is wrong (McGrath, 2009, p. 96).
Punitive criminal justice policy reforms across Australia in the last three decades have been
a constellation of perceived public punitiveness, managerialism, risk-averse policymaking, and
an increased focus on victims’rights (Freiberg et al., 2018; Moffa et al., 2019; Ruyters et al.,
2020). Several populist responses to crime have been criticized for failing to consider conse-
quences, or not achieving their intended purposes (see Brown & Quilter, 2014; McNamara
& Quilter, 2016; Methven, 2019; Solonec, 2015). “Tough on crime”policies such as amend-
ments to bail policy, mandatory sentencing regimes, and paperless arrests have seen problem-
atic policy shifts with consequences that must have been anticipated, impacting the most
vulnerable in the community (Brown & Quilter, 2014; McNamara & Quilter, 2016; Solonec,
2015). Rather than a “solution,”these reforms often only serve the political objectives of
those who formulate them, providing little justice for all involved.
As we have argued previously, the highly politicized reframing of parole systems across
Australia has seen a reimagining of the function of parole (Moffa et al., 2019; see also
Freiberg et al., 2018). Parole was established in Australia with the goals and ideals of providing
rehabilitation and re-entry supervision (Fitzgerald et al., 2016), but the purpose of parole has
been reframed in public consciousness through the politicization of recent reforms that privi-
leges community safety over prisoners’rights (Moffa et al., 2019). Reimagining parole as
unjustified early release created a political discourse that only sees “justice”achieved by pris-
oners serving full sentences, rather than meeting the original purpose of community safety
through supervised re-entry.
The introduction of “no body, no parole”(NBNP) laws have proven a politically expedient
alteration to parole policy (Hall et al., 2016). When adopted as a political cause in the context of
no body homicides, parole becomes a commodity that is bargained for. The political appetite
for these reforms in Australia was prompted in Western Australia by Margaret Dodd, mother of
homicide victim Hayley Dodd, whose remains have yet to be found at the time of writing
(Manfield et al., 2021). Dodd’s activism and momentum in other states resulted in the
passage of NBNP laws in six Australian jurisdictions between 2015 and 2019: New South
Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia.
The reforms assume that people convicted of murder, manslaughter, and accessory offences
would be encouraged to disclose the location (or last known location) of their victims’
remains to be eligible to apply for parole (see for example, Queensland Parliament, 2017,
p. 2097). Under s193A(2) Corrective Services Act 2006 (QLD), for example, the Parole
Board Queensland (PBQ, or Board) must refuse to grant an application for parole unless sat-
isfied of the prisoner’s satisfactory cooperation in locating the victim’s remains.
Our aim is to assess the extent to which the legislative aims of NBNP have been met in
Queensland. We focus on this jurisdiction for two reasons. First, Queensland has the second
highest number of “no body”cases in Australia (Ferguson & Pooley, 2019). More significantly,
it is one of two Australian jurisdictions in which the parole bodies publicly share their NBNP
decisions (Ruyters et al., 2020). Transparency by Australian parole boards is selective. While
Tasmania has published parole decisions since 2002 (Parole Board of Tasmania, 2020),
Western Australia limits publication to specific categories of offending (Prisoners Review
Board of Western Australia, 2021), NSW has only ten published decisions at the time of
Moffa et al. 163
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