From punishment to protection: Containing and controlling the lives of people with disabilities in human rights

Abstract

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.