Journal
Articles
Paper lands
ZHEZHI SPIDERS SWARMED over the old lady and her luggage, hunting for drugs and weapons and everything else forbidden...
Manus Prison theory
Shortly after the release of No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador, 2018), both Behrouz Boochani...
Reassessing the reoffending question
To reduce Indigenous incarceration will require significant change in the rates of criminalising Indigenous people, and for rates of criminalisation to decline will require changes to criminal laws and procedures, along with a sustained policy focus on reducing social and economic disadvantage of Indigenous people.
Turning things inside out
The Darwin Correctional Centre houses around 1,100 prisoners, about eighty of whom are women. Like a slice of pie, the female sector, also known as Sector Four, sits between industries, where the men do jobs like woodworking and food prep, and the men’s maximum security sector. A tall cyclone fence, clad in black plastic, separates the men from the women.
Five years is too long
As Tony’s case drags on, your family’s conversations about it are less frequent. Every time an Australian Consulate official visits Tony at the detention centre, you receive a report, and every time, there is the same final note on his current legal status: …sentenced to a suspended death penalty and seizure of all personal property. The verdict hearing will be held at a later date.
Retribution, reform, rehabilitation
THE PERIMETER OF the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and...
All men choose the path they walk
THE WAILING THERE IS A deep wailing across this country. I heard it once when I was a child in...
Enduring change
PUBLIC INQUIRIES AND their subsequent reports suffer chequered histories in Australia. Some disappear with nary a trace, while others go...
Unmasking a culture of corruption
WITH THE PASSING of thirty years since Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and its seminal report, an opportunity arises to sit...
Looking at the big picture
THEY WRITE MUSICALS about it in the US; swear by it in Canada; swear about it in Australia; and...
Adjudged
William Spalyng, who, for selling putrid beef…was put upon the pillory, and the carcasses were burnt beneath. Arthur Griffiths, The...
As if children mattered…
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children...
