Abolitionism and the Paradox of Penal Reform in Australia: Indigenous Women, Colonial Patriarchy and Cooption

Abstract

In this article we provide an explanation of abolitionism in the context of the Australian colonial project. Our intention is 10 advance a critical understanding of the paradoxes and challenges presented to the abolitionist vision by the project of penal reform. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Australia has witnessed the emergence of a diffuse patchwork of abolition and prisoner rights campaigns, which have been informed by the unique political and cultural contexts of the various Australian state jurisdictions. 1 Some of these campaigns, specifically in States such as New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, have had a profound impact by eliciting and shaping government and correctional penal reform programs (Brown and Zdenkowski 1982: Carlton 2007). Paradoxically, Australia has witnessed at the same time a revalorization of the prison and of punitive measures as primary solutions for dealing with social problems and structural disadvantage (Baldry et al. 2011).