Deconstructing imprisonment: Exploring sentencing discourses in the District Court of New South Wales

Abstract

In Australia, imprisonment remains a popular form of crime control amidst rising costs in prison expenditure and high rates of prison return. While changes to crime rates and to policing policy have impacted the growing prisoner population in recent years, less is known about the language underpinning the courts’ decision to imprison. This article presents the results of a critical discourse analysis on 124 sentencing remarks on imprisonment from the District Court of New South Wales in 2017. Three discourses were identified in the texts as facilitating the justification of a prison sentence: the discourse of control, the discourse of safety and the discourse of duty. These findings highlight the ways in which the prison is constructed and legitimated in the courts, which has implications not only for sentencing policy and practice but also for conceptions and applications of justice more broadly.