ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that transformation, looking back at penal policy and practice since the 1970s and 80s and then charting the rise and impact of risk thinking on Australian penality. It examines three elements of this expanded but unstable relationship of risk to penality: the emergence of risk as a feature of penal administration, including the proliferation of risk assessments as central elements of penal process. The role of risk in discourses around imprisonment and increasingly restrictive responses to offending, such as in the area of bail eligibility. Finally the complex relationship between imperatives toward prison-as-warehouse and prison-as-rehab-centre penal modalities, wherein risk has played a key part in advancing each of these forces shaping the character of contemporary Australian imprisonment. Correctional or penal managerialism is typically represented within criminology as a product of neoliberal governmental logics or in a more limited fashion as part of a broader movement toward a new public management model imitative of business.
