An essay written for a British journal by Suvendrini Perera reposted
from Christine Howes' list....
Racialised Punishment and Mandatory Sentencing in Australia
(Written for the UK journal Race & Class)
Suvendrini Perera
Write of life / the pious said
Forget the past / the past is dead
But all I see / in front of me
Is a concrete floor / a cell door / and John
Pat
Agh! Tear out the page / forget his age
Thin skull they cried / that's why he died!
But I can't forget the silhouette
Of a concrete floor / a cell door / and John
Pat
Jack
Davis
Jack Davis's lament for John Pat, found dead in a West Australian prison
cell at age 16, was dedicated to 'Maisie Pat and to all mothers who have
suffered similar loss', thus linking this individual killing with those
of numerous other young indigenous men in the Australian penal system,
young men whose names have become only too familiar in a litany of pain,
injustice and death. David Gundy aged 29; Robert Walker, aged 25; Eddie
Murray, aged 21; Malcolm Smith, aged 28; Daniel Yock aged 18. And many
more.
A new name was recently added to this register of death, that of 15
year-old boy, found hanging in his room while in juvenile detention.
But this death, though part of a chillingly well known sequence, also
foreshadows new, even more frightening possibilities. It is the first
fatality to result from mandatory sentencing laws recently introduced in
Australia's Northern Territory (NT). Under this law a minimum jail
sentence is mandatory for 'property offences' (or in the case of
juveniles for a second conviction), leaving judges and magistrates with
no option but imprisonment for the most trivial of acts. A homeless
indigenous man has been imprisoned for stealing a towel off a
clothesline to dry himself, an apprentice for kicking a light bulb in an
argument with his boss.
According to William Jonas, 'A 24-year old indigenous mother who
received a stolen can of beer worth $2.50 and an 18-year old man who
stole a cigarette lighter and then obeyed his father and admitted it to
the police, were each imprisoned for 14 days. A 15-year old Aboriginal
boy who broke a window after hearing about the suicide of a close friend
was sentenced under mandatory detention for damaging property, then he
attempted suicide.'
In the case of the 15-year old boy from Groote Eylandt, the offence was
the theft of pens, texta and paints. For this he was sentenced to a
mandatory 28-day sentence in a juvenile detention centre in Darwin, two
hours away by plane and worlds removed from his accustomed home. Here,
he was apparently sent to his room one evening for refusing to help
clean up after dinner.
Five minutes later, he was found hanging on the sheets from his bed.
Defenders of mandatory sentencing cling to the argument that the law
applies alike to offenders of all racial and ethnic groups and is
therefore not discriminatory -- Anglo-Australians are also subject to
mandatory sentencing for minor offences. But this 'colour-blind'
conception of the law ignores the structurally racialised nature of the
penal system in colonising societies like Australia and the United
States. In this racialised system, as the findings of a Royal Commission
into black deaths in custody revealed, a jail term has specific,
devastating consequences for indigenous peoples. The impact of
imprisonment on indigenous Australians cannot be separated from a linked
historical and ongoing sequence of race, incarceration and punishment.
In her essay 'Racialised Punishment and Prison Abolition' Angela Davis
provides an alternative to Foucault's genealogy of the prison with its
obliviousness to questions of race. A different genealogy of the prison
in the U.S. Davis writes, 'would accentuate the links between
confinement, punishment and race. At least four systems of incarceration
could be identified: the reservation system, slavery, the mission
system, and the internment camps of World War
II. Within the U.S. incarceration has thus played a pivotal role in the
histories of Native Americans and people of African, Mexican and Asian
descent. In all these places people were involuntarily confined and
punished for no other reason than their race or ethnicity'.
A racialised genealogy of the Australian prison system shows that since
colonisation, the history of institutionalisation and incarceration of
indigenous peoples has taken varied forms -- expulsion away from
traditional country to distant camps and reserves as the most productive
lands were claimed for sheep and cattle grazing; incarceration in
detention centres or penal settlements such as Palm Island for people
deemed intractable or uncooperative, and above all, the systematic
forced removal of children for confinement in missions for the purposes
of assimilation.
And, as the 1997 Inquiry into this history shows, the removal of
Aboriginal children continues today in different forms through practices
such detention, child substitute care and creation of wards of the
state.
Mandatory sentencing is in effect the latest mechanism in a long
continuum of dislocation and dispersal of Aboriginal community and
family life.
Currently, remote communities are being especially hard hit by mandatory
sentencing. Given the lack of meaningful work or leisure facilities, the
population of young adults and children is particularly vulnerable to
mandatory sentencing for minor offences. Just days after the death of
the 15 year-old boy, 21 year-old Jamie Warramara, also from Groote
Eylandt, was given the mandatory sentence of one year in jail for a
third 'property offence'. What 'property offence'? Stealing $23 worth of
biscuits from the mess at the GEMCO mine (the world's richest manganese
mine) on Christmas day, because he was hungry. To date, three young men
have been sentenced to a total of 27 months jail time for this single
theft of biscuits. Such events, as Social Justice Commissioner William
Jonas pointed out following the death of the 15 year-old boy, are not
tragic, having nothing noble or inevitable about them; they are simply
obscene.
As opposition mounts in the rest of Australia to mandatory sentencing in
the Northern Territory and Western Australia (where different 'three
strikes and you're in' mandatory sentencing laws operate), opponents of
the laws point out that it is counter-productive to spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars jailing an offender for petty thefts often
amounting to only a few dollars. These arguments miss the actual logic
of the penalty: mandatory sentencing is not about saving money for the
system, or even reducing the crime rate (which it has manifestly failed
to do), but about entrenching a racialised 'justice' system. This system
enshrines and upholds specific racial and cultural values: the sanctity
of (non-indigenous) 'property', the hallowed role of (Anglo-Australian)
'law and order'. To represent the issue as 'law and order' and the
problem as 'crime' allows no space to articulate the central issues of
race/ethnicity on which this system is premised. Indeed, the continuity
of the system depends on ignoring its racialised premises. To again cite
Davis's comments on the U.S system,
'when the structural character of racism is ignored in discussions about
crime and the rising populations of incarcerated people, the racial
imbalance in jails and prisons is treated as a contingency, at best as a
product of the "culture of poverty" and at worst as proof of an assumed
black monopoly on criminality. The high proportion of black people in
the criminal justice system is thus normalized and neither the state nor
the general public is required to talk about and act on the meaning of
that racial imbalance.'
The logic of mandatory sentencing is a racist logic. The racialised
function of mandatory sentencing is demonstrated by the fact that since
its introduction imprisonment rates have increased for indigenous young
people and adults in both the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
According to the Top End Women's Legal Service, since the introduction
of mandatory sentencing, imprisonment rates for indigenous women have
grown by more than 400%. Rates of imprisonment of the non-Aboriginal
population have actually
declined. Armed with the populist catchcry of 'property', 'stability'
and
'law and order' state and territory governments thumb their noses at
international treaty obligations such as the UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. The Federal Government stands by, using the flimsy excuse of
'states' rights' for its palpable reluctance to step in and overrule the
laws (though there are a number of precedents for this course of
action). Hopes of international pressure are growing with the UN
Secretary General's visit to Australia and the approach of the Sydney
Olympics. ('Bugger the Olympics' the NT Chief Minister is on record as
saying).
Although international pressure is undoubtedly important for the
campaign against mandatory sentencing, a more long-term need is for
activists to shift the focus to the concealed, indeed mostly
unspeakable, links between confinement, punishment and race. 'Crime'
Davis indispensably points out, 'is ... one of the masquerades behind
which "race" with all its menacing ideological complexity, mobilizes old
public fears and creates new ones.'
Stripping away the flimsy semblance of respectability that 'law and
order' gives to mandatory sentencing reveals the ugly realities of a
'justice' system that finds new and improved ways to reproduce racism.
***
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