Institutional racism and (in)justice: Australia in the 21st century

This article focusses on systemic and institutionalised racism against Indigenous people as a contemporary feature of the Australian social and penal landscape, and its implications for justice. There has been ongoing concern with institutional racism within the criminal justice system, however, this article concentrates on the intersection between institutional racism in non-criminal justice settings and their compounding effect on criminalization. Despite legal prohibitions on racial discrimination, various forms of institutional racism continue unabated. Indeed, part of the argument is that broader political changes particularly associated with the influence of neoliberalism on social policy have exacerbated the problem of institutional racism and redefined and reinforced the link between welfare and criminalization. Indeed, social welfare has come to be informed by the same values and philosophies as criminal justice: deterrence, surveillance, stigma and graduated sanctions or punishments. How might we understand these broader shifts in the public policy environment, to what extent do they reflect and reproduce institutional racism, and how do they bleed into increased criminalization? I endeavour to answer this question through the consideration of two specific sites of social welfare policy – child protection and social housing – and to consider how systemic and institutional forms of racism play out in daily life for Indigenous people and how they interact with criminal justice.

The Effectiveness of Private Forest Institutional and Policy in Banjarnegara and Banyumas Regency

This research aimed to analyze the effectiveness of institusional and policy on private forest. The research was conducted in Banjarnegara and Banyumas Regency in August 2012 - May 2013. The methods used in this study are structured interview, open interview and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Assessment of institutional effectiveness was done to government institutional, marketing institututional, and farmer institutional using recommended indicator namely: 1) user and resource boundaries, 2) appropriation and provision, 3) collective-choice arrangements, 4) monitoring, 5) graduated sanctions, 6) conflict-resolution mechanisms, and 7) recognition of appropriators’ rights to organize. The collected data were processed using likert scale and analyzed descriptively. The results showed that effectiveness of institutional in Kabupaten Banjarnegara and Banyumas Regency was moderate condition (quite effective). The effectiveness of private forest policy is seen from four policy viewpoints: policy accuracy, policy implementation, target accuracy, and environmental accuracy. Private forest policy in Kabupaten Banjarnegara is effective based on policy accuracy and environmental accuracy, while private forest policy in Banyumas Regency is effective based on target accuracy and environmental accuracy. This difference in assessment is due to the different of policy or program at the location according to the condition and the desire of community.Keywords: effectiveness, private forest, institutional, policy

Alternatives to Incarceration

Alternatives to incarceration are more than options, they have evolved into sentences of their own accord. Originally, probation and prison were the two major sentences; however, the concept of intermediate or graduated sanctions emerged in the 1980s and evolved throughout the 1990s. While alternatives to incarceration were considered options, they are now recognized as intermediate sanctions, graduated sanctions, and just plain sentencing options. This emergence occurred during the time that probation-plus-conditions sentences spiked, so that the average probationer now has over 17 standard conditions. With Justice Reinvestment Initiatives as a national effort to reduce the impact of mass incarceration policies, the JRI policy effort the has served to legitimize sentences that used to be considered “alternatives” by incorporating risk/need assessments, legislation to reduce sentence lengths and incarceration sentences, and changes in practices to address noncompliant probationers and parolees. Here, a new conceptual model is proposed that integrates sentencing options with results from a risk and need assessment depending on various types of liberty restrictions. Given the need to reduce prison overcrowding, there is an even further need to examine how different sentencing options can be used for different type of individuals.

Experiments combining communication with punishment options demonstrate how individuals can overcome social dilemmas

Guala raises important questions about the misinterpretation of experimental studies that have found that subjects engage in costly punishment. Instead of positing that punishment is the solution for social dilemmas, earlier research posited that when individuals facing a social dilemma agreed on their own rules and used graduated sanctions, they were more likely to have robust solutions over time.