The prison abolition movements have reinvigorated debate on the left about the function of carceral estates in maintaining class and racial differences under late capitalism. In this chapter we argue that, viewed through a critical colonial lens, abolitionism is only meaningful if it engages with decolonizing, as well as abolitionist currents and impulses in the Global South. For Indigenous peoples, the carceral gulag has always been a ‘place of exception’ where penal and non-penal sites meshed together in the pursuit of colonial, rather than disciplinary, objectives. We maintain that prison in the contemporary colony should be viewed as part of an archipelago of camps existing to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. We employ Agamben’s particular turn on the ‘camp’ – ‘the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (Agamben, 1998) to explore the ways in which its logic underpins settler colonial interventions across time and space to create dispossessed rather than simply ‘docile’ subjects in the Foucauldian sense.

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are much more likely to be arrested, charged with criminal offences and imprisoned than other Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprise 49% of young people in detention but only 5.8% of the Australian population aged 10-17. This study investigated changes between 1997 and 2019 in the interaction of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young people with the justice system in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. The prevalence of young people being charged with an alleged offence decreased by more than 60% between 1999 and 2001, co-incident with the introduction of the Juvenile Diversion Scheme in August 2000. Thereafter, for non-Aboriginal young people there was a small and temporary increase, but for Aboriginal young people prevalence increased almost back to pre-2000 levels by 2015 before starting to decrease. Aboriginal young people comprised 57% of those charged with any offence in 1997, rising to 88% in 2019. Further investigation is needed to understand the reasons for divergent trends in the prevalence of alleged offending for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young people, which may include the role of diversion, differences in the nature of offences and systemic bias and racism.

‘Race’ and ‘racism’ are, of course, issues which have assumed a central significance in recent public debates on policing. It is important to sketch in some of this background, if only to indicate the scale of the preoccupation which centres upon ‘racism’ and ‘policing’, even though our aim here is more modest. In Northam, which, in terms of wealth and poverty and the rich diversity of cultures and languages, is an extraordinarily mixed area of inner London, there has for some years been a practice of encouraging and co-opting members of minority ethnic groups on to the borough police consultative committee. Struggles over definitions of what is a ‘racial’ incident are endemic. An incident, perhaps an assault or criminal damage, is reported to the police and the victim takes the view that there is racial motivation; the investigating officer, on the other hand, on the basis of his previous experience thinks not.

Family violence within Aboriginal communities continues to attract considerable scholarly, governmental and public attention in Australia. While rates of victimization are significantly higher than non-Aboriginal rates, Aboriginal women remain suspicious of the ‘carceral feminism’ remedy, arguing that family violence is a legacy of colonialism, systemic racism, and the intergenerational impacts of trauma, requiring its own distinctive suite of responses, ‘uncoupled’ from the dominant feminist narrative of gender inequality, coercive control and patriarchy. We conclude that achieving meaningful reductions in family violence hinges on a decolonising process that shifts power from settler to Aboriginal structures. Aboriginal peoples are increasingly advocating for strengths-based and community-led solutions that are culturally safe, involve Aboriginal justice models, and recognises the salience of Aboriginal Law and Culture. This paper is based on qualitative research in six locations in northern Australia where traditional patterns of Aboriginal Law and Culture are robust. Employing a decolonising methodology, we explore the views of Elders in these communities regarding the existing role of Law and Culture, their criticisms of settler law, and their ambitions for a greater degree of partnership between mainstream and Aboriginal law. The paper advances a number of ideas, based on these discussions, that might facilitate a paradigm shift in theory and practice regarding intervention in family violence.

This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben (1998). First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care (Agamben 1998). Zones of exception place First Nations people in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”

The concept of throughcare as a means to prevent recidivism continues to attract considerable attention in Australia over the last couple of years. This is particularly the case for Indigenous peoples, as the transition to life after imprisonment proves to be particularly challenging for them, resulting in high rates of recidivism and ongoing overrepresentation in Australian prisons. In this contribution, we report on research we conducted in two Australian jurisdictions. After identifying the problems in developing effective throughcare strategies for Indigenous peoples leaving prison, we turn to Canada for examples of good practice. Canada was chosen for comparison as it is also a settler colonial state, experiencing similar problems of overrepresentation of their Indigenous population in the prison. After a critical analysis of these practices, we conclude that the reasons for a problematic re-integration of Indigenous peoples are related to a tendency to impose solutions and strategies developed in the white mainstream onto Indigenous communities without acknowledging traditional cultures and structures.

Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system is a longstanding and well documented characteristic of the Australian penal landscape. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, approximately two percent of the Australian adult population in 2018 identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. In sharp contrast, the proportion of the national prison population that identifies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is 28 percent (ABS 2018).