ABSTRACT
This chapter completes the book’s analysis of court diversion by reference to a case study from New South Wales, Australia, focusing on the second and third steps in the judicial decision to divert a criminalised disabled person. After establishing in the first step that an individual is disabled, the second step concerns the appropriateness for the individual of court diversion as compared to criminal legal intervention and the third step is the availability of mental health and disability services to effectively control the individual. These latter two steps exemplify how court diversion’s carceral control of criminalised disabled people is situated in a wider context of its structural role in shoring up the regulative gaps and legal legitimacy of criminal law. The chapter makes this argument by bringing Foucauldian and critical disability scholarship on carceral control to an exploration of legal dynamics of the relationship between criminal law and court diversion. While a diverted individual avoids criminal legal intervention, the services that they must instead engage with set up ongoing dynamics of control. Ideals of independence, autonomy, empowerment and inclusion which are associated with these services and can be collectively understood as self-realisation of the liberal citizen are subtly operationalised towards ends of control, rather than giving individuals meaningful opportunities for consenting (or not consenting) to boundaries or constraints they might find useful.
