Medicalizing the Detention of Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory: A New/Old Regime of Control?

Abstract

The forcible removal and detention on reserves of many of Australia’s Indigenous people during much of the 20th century was pervasive and, according to Penny Pether, influenced her understandings of indefinite detention in other areas. She was interested in proliferating regimes of indefinite detention used as a technique to govern ‘dangerous’ populations. In this article, we examine how alcohol management schemes introduced in the 21st century in the Northern Territory, under the guise of welfare, continue the systemic confinement and control of Indigenous lives. The feared population has been reconstituted from one requiring protection as the remnants of a dying race, to one comprising vulnerable and criminogenic alcoholics who need to be detained for their own and others’ safety, and so they can be treated. We trace the genealogy of laws enabling the civil commitment of inebriates and addicts to show that in the form taken in the Northern Territory, the law has been aimed at the control and containment of a perceived antisocial population, rather than their treatment. Rather than protecting vulnerable people, the regime relied on techniques of detention and coercive treatment that continued the colonial state’s production of their Indigenous ‘vulnerability’. We examine this through the lens of the findings of a coronial inquiry into the death of an Indigenous woman in 2014, while detained for treatment and the subsequent evaluation of the Northern Territory’s Alcohol Mandatory Treatment Program.