Reproducing Criminality: How Cure Enhances Cause

Abstract

The extraordinarily high rates of Aboriginal imprisonment have received much if somewhat baffled attention from criminologists motivated by the desire to solve this social problem. But solutions should be preceded by analysis and analysis should begin with scepticism; we must always ask how a ‘social problem’ has been constructed. ² A simple example is the fact that Indigenous Australians automatically became vagrants when European law was declared sovereign in Australia.³ While the imported law created the crime of vagrancy, the vagrants were identified as the social problem. If we fail to understand the source and the nature of what are defined as social problems, the remedies we devise are likely to exacerbate them. Thus, the advice, ‘don’t just do something; stand there’ could be translated as ‘analysis should precede action’, recognising that the conventional definition of a social problem may conveniently conceal its social causes.⁴

She’s not Aboriginal; she’s rich. (Murri Aboriginal woman in Bourke, 1980s¹)