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The colonial history of Australia has been a struggle between Indigenous peoples and the colonisers over Country. This is often represented as a struggle over land – it's control and use. Yet, for Indigenous people, land was never simply an economic commodity to be exploited. It was and is ‘Country’ in a deeper sense of the word, a fundamental part of Indigenous cosmology and a necessary foundation to a person's and group's ontology or being in the world. Country, then, can be conceptualised as both a physical and metaphysical domain. Indeed, both domains are inseparably intertwined. The struggle over Country remains core to understanding the social and political place of Indigenous people within Aboriginal law and within the criminal law and institutions of the coloniser. Further, this ongoing struggle goes to the heart of understanding why Indigenous people start their discussions on reform and change within the criminal justice system with a demand for recognition, negotiation and respect for Indigenous self-determination and a demand to see Indigenous people as colonised peoples.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

After setting the political and personal contexts, defining key terms, and comparing Indigenous and restorative justice, I clarify three interrelated sites of contestation between and among feminist and anti-racist groups as these relate to alternative justice practices. They are the inequality caused by crime (victims and offenders), social divisions (race and gender politics), and individuals and collectivities (rights of offenders and victims). I outline an intersectional politics of justice, which seeks to address the conflicts at each site. My intersectional framework attempts to align victims’ and offenders’ interests in ways that are not a zero sum game, and to find common ground between feminist and anti-racist justice claims by identifying the negotiating moves each must make. It proposes that victims and offenders have positive rights that are not compromised by collectivities.

It was nearly twenty years ago that Howard Zehr (1990) wrote the first book about Restorative Justice (Changing Lenses), John Braithwaite (1989) wrote about “Crime, Shame and Reintegration” and New Zealand introduced the family group conference – a restorative process for resolving matters when children and young people became involved in offending.11Family group conferences are also used in the child welfare system when options are being considered for children thought to be in need of care or protection. These events marked the transition from a theoretical debate about alternatives to Western models of criminal justice to the recognition of a new theory, a new set of values and a new practical alternative to the Western-style court system. Since then, theory has evolved and many other jurisdictions have experimented with various processes for delivering restorative justice (Johnstone & Van Ness, 2007). Perhaps the most common form, especially for young people has been the use of the restorative conference in youth justice. From its beginnings in New Zealand, it has spread to Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Macao, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Singapore, South Africa, Tonga, Thailand and the United States of America. Many different forms of restorative family conferencing for young people who have offended have emerged in these different states, provinces and countries for many different types of offences and for people from many different cultures. In this chapter, I want to briefly review what has been learnt about the transferability of the process. In particular, what are the questions that have been largely resolved and what issues still remain unresolved? And what are the key conditions which must be met for the process to work in different jurisdictions and among different peoples and what aspects of the process tend to vary to reflect the diversity of cultures and customs within and between peoples in various areas?

While research often elaborates on outcomes of youth remand more broadly, the specific impact that remand has on indigenous young people can be overlooked, particularly in Australia. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper analyses interview data gathered from eight individual service providers from six community youth organisations in a city in Queensland, Australia.

Participants reported the specific effects of remand for indigenous young people and their families, noting especially the negative impact on the young people’s emotional, social and psychological development.

Results strongly suggest there is a blurring of the welfare and justice systems inherent within remand processes with indigenous young people, with remand employed so frequently that it has itself become a form of social support.