ABSTRACT
This chapter comprises a detailed reading of one case decided by the Australian High Court in 2013. Drawing upon Deleuzian ‘assemblage thinking’ on alcohol and other drug events, including those involving violence, I consider how legal approaches to sentencing Indigenous offenders constitute alcohol and other drug ‘addiction’/‘alcoholism’, violence, race, gender and place in Australia. I argue that the process of sentencing offenders in the criminal law necessarily entails an attempt, on the part of courts, to assemble the relative agency of various human and non-human actors in the commission of a crime, and that the process of affording agency to some actors and not others has political, ethical and material effects.
