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This article seeks to enhance criminology's understanding of the disability group home as a targeted site for confining and regulating disabled bodies. In particular, it seeks to extend criminology's burgeoning understanding of the archipelago of confinement and control, and build upon others' observations that within this archipelago, the penal has become mobile through site, and the carceral mobile through (disabled) body. The article shows how group homes serve a dual purpose and are marked by an uneven, bifurcated practice. For the vast majority of residents, group homes share little in common with other sites of confinement, but for a select few they can become multilayered sites of confinement and control, containing people first through the site of the group home itself, and then through the site of the person's disabled body (with all that the designation of disability permits under law). Data supporting the analysis are drawn from the Australian state of Victoria and includes both government documents, as well as transcripts from interviews with 12 stakeholders who provide services and support to people with disability residing within group homes.

In the last decade, criminology has begun to raise concerns about people with disabilities' problematic relationship with criminal justice systems. Yet we have ignored their problematic relationship with civil justice systems; a relationship which has seen people with disabilities subject to a range of punitive civil controls in the wake of their deinstitutionalisation. This article draws attention to one such punitive civil control, the Supervised Treatment Order regime in the Australian state of Victoria. Drawing on Foucault and his interlocutors' work on 'governmentality', and engaging with Cohen's concept of 'magical legalisms', the article reveals how this civil regime has become an effective mechanism for governing the lives of sex offenders with disabilities post their release from criminal justice systems. The article illuminates how this unusual function of the regime has not only been obscured from criminology's view through claims of legislative intent, but further reconstituted as protective of people with disabilities' human rights. The article concludes by discussing the implications of criminology's absence from engaging with such punitive civil orders for people with disabilities and the wider penal field.

There is concern among socio-legal scholars about the relationship that has formed between scholarly research and public policy. Pat Carlen contends that in the case of criminology, this relationship sees scholars increasingly struggle to maintain their critical capacity. The problem, according to Carlen, is that scholars trying to increase research output through partnership with policy makers often find this partnership hinges on an agreement that any research produced will conform to the parameters of the policy makers' needs. Furthermore, when scholars do not seek partnership with policy makers, they may face political hurdles in gaining access to institutional data. Scholars may be required to demonstrate the direct policy relevance of their research before policy makers will consider the type and extent of access granted. These kinds of barriers to data access have the potential to adversely impact the critical merit of socio-legal scholarship.This paper employs my own research as a case study to explore some of the foundations for socio-legal scholars' concerns about the appearance and impact of barriers to institutional data. My research aimed to explore how correctional agencies approach the offender rehabilitation principle of responsivity in relation to Indigenous offenders. Contemporary correctional literature states that to be responsive, correctional agencies must identify variances among offenders that may affect the delivery and reception of programs. Significantly, however, it is unclear what, if anything, correctional agencies should do to accommodate variances once identified. Accordingly, I sought access to correctional agencies to interview staff working in the areas of Indigenous offender rehabilitation policy and service who could elaborate on their agencies' approach to Indigenous offender responsivity. Agencies in four jurisdictions were approached. In seeking access to this institutional data, I encountered two main barriers that impacted the scope and direction of the project in unexpected ways.

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability ('disability-specific lawful violence'). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability ('disability-specific lawful violence'). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.

"Coercive medico-legal interventions are often employed to prevent people deemed to be unable to make competent decisions about their health, such as minors, people with mental illness, disability or problematic alcohol or other drug use, from harming themselves or others. These interventions can entail major curtailments of individuals liberty and bodily integrity, and may cause significant harm and distress. The use of coercive medico-legal interventions can also serve competing social interests that raise profound ethical, legal and clinical questions.Examining the ethical, social and legal issues involved in coerced care, this book brings together the views and insights from leading researchers from a range of disciplines, including criminology, law, ethics, psychology and public health, as well as legal and medical practitioners, social-service consumers and government officials. Topics addressed in this volume include: compulsory treatment and involuntary detention orders in civil mental health and disability law; mandatory alcohol and drug treatment programs and drug courts; community treatment orders; the use of welfare cards with Indigenous populations; mandated treatment of seriously ill minors; as well as adult guardianship and substituted decision-making regimes. These contributions attempt to shed light on why we use coercive interventions, whether we should, whether they are effective in achieving the benefits that are offered to justify their use, and the impact that they have on some of societys most vulnerable citizens in the names of justice and treatment. This book is essential reading for clinicians, researchers and legal practitioners involved in the study and application of coerced care, as well as students and scholars in the fields of law, medicine, ethics and criminology. The collection asks important questions about the increasing use of coercive care that demand to be answered, and offers critical insights, guidance and recommendations for those working in the field."--Provided by publisher.

On 9 August 2019, a workshop convened at the University of Melbourne, Australia, brought together academics, practitioners and advocates to explore patterns of violence and neglect within and across a range of confined settings: youth and adult prisons, immigration detention, aged and disability care and residential 'child protection'. Some of the participants in that workshop reflect here in eight pieces of writing that comprise this Special Themed Collection on 'Confinement: The spaces and practice of care and control'. The contributions are anchored and connected by the parallels in how violence manifests within and across these diverse sites of confinement – corporeally and subtly, individually and collectively. Yet as we reflect, separately and together, the differentiation and demarcation of these sites and systems of confinement serves to maintain their material and symbolic separation, and to conceal their connecting threads and commonalities.In our Editorial Introduction, we draw out themes running through the contributions to illustrate how they connect and collide, and how they illuminate intersections, differences and (sometimes unexpected) resonances between spaces, practices, settings and experiences of confinement. We identify three themes running through the seven other pieces that comprise this collection: erasure, identity and voice. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic and its implications for how we think about and experience freedom, autonomy, isolation and connection, we consider these themes: how violence is hidden from view and erased from public and political memory; how identities are shaped and swallowed by institutional practices and patterns of dehumanisation, coercion and control; and how the voices of those with lived experience of confinement – both as 'keepers' and the confined – help deepen our understanding of the threads that connect and comprise the carceral webs in which we are all entangled.

Co-production; prisons; criminal justice; youth detention

"This book explores practical examples of co-production in criminal justice research and practice. Through a series of seven case studies, the authors examine what people do when they co-produce knowledge in criminal justice contexts: in prisons and youth detention centres; with criminalised women; from practitioners' perspectives; and with First Nations communities. Co-production holds a promise: that people whose lives are entangled in the criminal justice system can be valued as participants and partners, helping to shape how the system works. But how realistic is it to imagine criminal justice 'service users' participating, partnering, and sharing genuine decision-making power with those explicitly holding power over them? Taking a sophisticated yet accessible theoretical approach, the authors consider issues of power, hierarchy and different ways of knowing to understand the perils and possibilities of co-production under the shadow of 'justice'. In exploring these complexities, the book brings cautious optimism to co-production partners and project leaders. This book provides a foundational text for scholars and practitioners seeking to apply co-production principles in their research and practice. With stories from Australia, the UK and Ireland, the text will appeal to the international community. For students of criminology and social work, the book's critical insights will enhance their work in the field"--