ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides instances of penal culture in operation, for example in the blurring of the notion of what constitutes the 'penal' and its movement into what were seen as separate non-penal spaces in the community; the variability in imprisonment rates across Australian states and territories and in bail, sentencing and parole provisions, and the local legal, political and cultural practices which produce those rates. It argues that penal culture has involved the construction of particular categories of offender, such as terrorist and sex offender as justifying preventive detention. The discussion of penal modernity and the post-colonial foregrounds the history of colonial penality's most enduring legacy, the contemporary hyperincarceration of Indigenous peoples. Transportation was an important part of a global debate about the punishment of crime, penal philosophies and practices, and notions of reform under the influence of the Enlightenment.
