Community-Based Strategies in Aboriginal Criminal Justice: The Northern Territory Experience

Abstract

Recent attempts to involve the remote and small town communities of Northern Australia in their own policing and correctional services have often been held up as a model for developing Aboriginal criminal justice policies. Such a proposal raises important questions as to both the construction of the post-colonial ‘community’ in remote and settled Australia and the sociological principles by which these criminal justice schemes (eg night patrols, community wardens, community corrections) have been constituted. The paper explores the constructions of the Aboriginal community over the past two decades (ethnographic, politico-administrative and postmodernist) as a background to the development and implementation of community-based criminal justice schemes in the Northern Territory. A typology of post-colonial criminal justice strategies is developed which identifies four ‘ideal types’ in which the initiatives may be positioned. These are the mediative (community wardens, night patrols), the educative (community justice programs), the neo-colonialist (new forms of imposed European laws and policing) and the incorporative (pervasive and totalising forms of control). The possibility of transposing these Northern Territory schemes to other Aboriginal situations is then critically evaluated in the light of differing socio-political constructions of ‘community’.