ABSTRACT
This chapter provides broader legislative and lived contexts to the book’s case study of diversion into community disability and mental health services in New South Wales, Australia. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the legislative framework and history of diversion in New South Wales. It then shifts to present institutional narratives of the criminal justice and institutional pathways of two hypothetical individuals diverted through the New South Wales legislation at some point in their life. These institutional narratives illuminate the early and repeated nature of their criminal justice contact and the role of child welfare and disability and mental health services in criminalisation. The institutional narratives also show multiple dimensions of this criminal justice contact, which includes offender contact as well as victim contact and contact through civil mental health legislation. The picture drawn in Chapter 5 of those who are diverted exposes a gap between the way in which disability and criminal law are presented in the diversion legislation itself and the material conditions of the criminalised disabled people who are diverted, which are characterised by violence, deprivation, precarity, debility and state irresponsibility under conditions of settler colonialism.
