ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to understand the specifics of governing young offenders and their criminality via diversionary programmes, in the context of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). In doing so, we bring a geographical and carceral mobilities focus to the study of youth justice. NSW has developed a suite of diversionary measures, that is, pre-sentence and post-sentence options to keep young people away from the formal court system. However, whilst we argue that this presents a clear youth justice policy (Young Offenders Act NSW 1997), these diversionary measures manifest as liminal carceral spaces where young people are governed and where detention in an institution is positioned on a continuum of punitive sanctions. Such diversionary programmes are contextualised in newly articulated relations of surveillance and security in the antiterror state. They categorise criminality and demonise the non-White other (Monaqhan, 2012) in tracking the movement of youth deemed ‘at risk’ of crime in non-penal spaces of the community (Follis, 2015). Indeed, we also propose that in a neocolonial state such as NSW, contemporary articulations of hyperincarceration, emerge from landscapes of colonial carceral regimes, whilst also embodying distinct characteristics and patterns of resistance.
