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.

Justice reinvestment was introduced as a response to mass incarceration and racial disparity in the United States in 2003. This book examines justice reinvestment from its origins, its potential as a mechanism for winding back imprisonment rates, and its portability to Australia, the United Kingdom and beyond. The authors analyze the principles and processes of justice reinvestment, including the early neighborhood focus on 'million dollar blocks'. They further scrutinize the claims of evidence-based and data-driven policy, which have been used in the practical implementation strategies featured in bipartisan legislative criminal justice system reforms. This book takes a comparative approach to justice reinvestment by examining the differences in political, legal and cultural contexts between the United States and Australia in particular. It argues for a community-driven approach, originating in vulnerable Indigenous communities with high imprisonment rates, as part of a more general movement for Indigenous democracy. While supporting a social justice approach, the book confronts significantly the problematic features of the politics of locality and community, the process of criminal justice policy transfer, and rationalist conceptions of policy. It will be essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners of criminal justice and criminal law.

Almost three decades have passed since a series of gun massacres shocked the nation and led to a major inquiry into Australian violence. Its ground breaking report unveiled the centrality of violence in our history and society - violence that commonly occurs in the routines and practices of everyday life - and the failings of the criminal justice system to deal with much of it. Australian Violence reflects shifts in our understanding of violence and debates issues surrounding it. It offers contemporary analyses of violence in the lives of women and girls, male drinking violence, prison violence, gun debates and gun-owning culture, and more recent concerns with hate crime, rural crime, harm directed at animals, risky and 'dangerous' offenders, and borders and detention, as well as new forms of community prevention and alternative criminal justice. It acknowledges state violence in Australia's history and present, in the dispossession of Indigenous people and the denial of Indigenous knowledge, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The book engages with international theory, research and practice but also offers a distinctive Australian approach that considers what it means to be a settler nation in the global south. The authors include scholars and researchers who have led critical study and national debates about these topics and perspectives on violence.