Racial penal governance in Australia and moments of appearance: disrupting disappearance and visibilizing women on the inside

ABSTRACT

The paper considers the lives of women that are invisibilized by the racial penal governing mechanisms of the settler state. It demonstrates how a racial penal governance is configured historically by its interlockings with multiple and hierarchical systems of oppression that intervene differently in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women, convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women. The paper engages with four ‘moments of appearances’ that interrupt and speak back to racial penal governance. Mirzoeff’s The appearance of Black Lives Matter (2017, https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/) theorization of decolonial spaces of appearance is integrated to the analysis of historical and recent moments of appearance visibilized in the testimonials of Thomas Brune, the Aboriginal youth Co-editor of the Flinders Island Chronicle in 1837 in the Wybalenna prison Camp and of Zoe, Alison and Pamela who have lived experience of prisons. These are embodied moments that make lives in prisons appear and matter.

KEYWORDS:

• Incarceration
• race
• gender
• penal governance
• intersectionality
• women

Introduction: setting the context

As an undergraduate student, I never felt safe to discuss my own criminalization. The fact that within a few months of migrating from Italy I was caught in the criminal legal system of Australia has not been an easy subject to discuss. But this silence has not been all of my making! On the contrary, universities and their communities have participated in invisibilizing my penal living. A few years after my criminalization, when I appeared in court for trespassing during a student protest against a military base, I was the only migrant student activist that the police distinguished as a ‘real criminal’ with a prior conviction. I remember looking around the courtroom and seeing my ‘comrades’ absorbing the news of my prior conviction with disbelief. And whilst the imposed presence of this criminality did not stop my comrades from talking to me about the military bases, none of them discussed the penal violence that hit me in that courtroom or in my past. What I experienced was a benevolent kind of love! You know the one that often proclaims love for humanity as a kind of civilizing mission and is based on charity and possession of the ‘other’ (Secombe, 2007). This love offers a plan for salvation that rests on disappearing one’s interactions with penal governance as a form of social distancing from it. Principally, this is the kind of love that I would argue continues to distance criminalized women from justice as it remains attached to the violence of the category of the female criminal as evoked by the ensembles of penal governance (Da Silva, 2014). This kind of love maintains universities and their communities in a continuum with ensembles of penal governance. Together they operate to disappear the means by which they interlock with systems of race, whiteness, gender, sexuality, poverty and disability and criminalize women within the contexts of the colony, settler state, communities and households (see Richie, 2012; Survived and Punished, 2019).

As a casual Tutor and Lecturer, I have witnessed students interrupting the path to penal distance. More students visibly relay at times lengthy narratives on their time spent in prison; or on fearing the deportation of their criminalized cousin to a country where they had never been; or on the losing contact with an incarcerated son; or on the exhaustion caused by waiting for a court hearing; or on attending the funeral of their dearest friend’s brother who had been recently released from prison; or on being always stopped and followed by police or negotiating preventative orders against violent intimate partners. These are all unsolicited testimonies, that I would argue connect with what Mirzoeff (2017) names as ‘moments of appearance’ that make penal living matter. They materialize the existence of everyday penal living in a space that is imagined at a distance from penal relations and that disappears or rather invisibilizes these relations. These students, in their testimonies and recounts of penal trauma, enable the appearance of what has been invisibilized by the state and its various institutions (here the university) by effectively embodying what is has been eliminated and effaced – these are affective moments as they corporeally make ‘real’ the traumatic impact of these regimes of penal violence. As such, these are embodied ‘moments of appearance’ that materially name, disrupt and interrogate the penal violence of the state.

There are clear historical and ongoing challenges to penal distancing on campuses. It was when I was looking into establishing some formal assistance on campus for women out of prison wishing to enter/or re-enter tertiary education, that it became clear that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ tertiary initiatives and programs, including research and knowledge, had long been working to create academic communities that did not assume a penal culture of distance (see also Behrendt, 2012; Wilks & Wilson, 2015).

The purpose of this paper

Penal distancing is not a casual occurrence. This paper begins to consider the lives that are invisibilized by the penal governing relations of the settler state. I examine how settler colonialism negates its own colonial criminality and instrumentalizes crime, criminality and punishment to disappear the exercise of Indigenous laws and sovereignties. As I demonstrate, a racial penal governance is configured historically and currently by the interlockings with multiple and hierarchical systems of oppression that intervene differently in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women, convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women. This analysis enables the examination of the multiple sites of intervention of racial penal governance and the ways they rest on disappearing, eliminating and debilitating such lives as part of securing settler colonial institutions and relations.

The paper engages with moments of appearances that interrupt and speak back to the forcefulness of racial penal relations as produced in 1837 in the Wybalenna prison Camp in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) and in current neoliberal prisons in Australia. I introduce the historical and more recent moments of appearance made visible in the testimonials of Thomas Brune, Zoe, Alison and Pamela. I draw from Mirzoeff’s (2017) theorization of decolonial spaces of appearance to reflect on how these four testimonials are moments of appearance that make life in prison count and claim what there is to say on the living within racial penal governance. In relation to Black Lives Matter and earlier historical movements Mirzoeff considers the current and historical usage of visual tactics as part of modalities that claim moments of direct appearance that demand the right to look and be seen (2017, p. 18). In this analysis I engage with one testimonial from Thomas Brune, a skilled 13 years old Aboriginal child who was appointed to be co-editor for the Flinders Island Chronicle when he was a prisoner in the Wybalenna Camp (see Palombo, 2015)¹ I argue that this writing from the inside of the Camp visibilizes the racial brutality of prison Camp and makes Black fellow lives appear and matter by asserting an urgent call to live at a moment when the disappearance is imminent. I also refer to the three testimonials from women with recent lived experience of prison.² These form part of a series of interviews that I conducted at the Women in Prison Advocacy Network (WIPAN) in 2016.³ The testimonials embodied ‘moments of appearance’ that materially name and interrogate penal violence, testify to prisons as spaces of trauma. These appearances in their distinct ways make life in prison appear and matter. They reject Camps and prisons exposing them as unsafe spaces that open these lives to death, grief, debility and trauma. Although these four cases are, on the one hand, historically discontinuous and marked by different genres (e.g. nineteenth-century Indigenous journalism and twenty-first-century oral interviews), on the other hand, as I demonstrate below, they are all inscribed by clear lines of interlocking continuity by the forces of settler colonialism and regimes of racial penal governmentality.

Defining the terms

Racial penal governmentality refers here to the complex apparatus constituted by biopolitical rationalities and techniques, ensembles and procedures that govern targeted individuals and/or populations. My specific focus is on the exercise of settler colonial forms of power that includes a biopower that centres around two poles – the always already racialized body (Da Silva, 2007) and the populations as the ‘species body’ to either discipline or regulate individuals, populations or communities (Foucault, 1979, p. 139; Pugliese, 2010). I also extend this discussion to demonstrate how the settler state enacts a ‘right to maim’ precarious populations by making these lives open to injury and debilitation (Puar, 2017). A biopolitics of debilitation is a calculated configuration of precarity that in this paper is produced historically through the analysis of convict female labour, refugees and current hyper-incarceration of marginalized white women. What must be clarified here is that this politics of debility is specifically concerned with the designation of ‘being unworthy of health and targeted for injury’ (Puar, 2017, p. 69).

My usage of racial penal governance places particular emphasis on how penality is grounded on what da Silva names as the ‘analytics of raciality’ part of a priori European onto-epistemological order that reconfigures and distinguishes racial lives as open and affectable to the force of a settler colonial law. Raciality is constitutive of the juridical, economic and moral ground of the settler colony that enforces affectability by internalizing affectable lives into a western penal order that excludes by criminalizing these bodies and disappearing its forcefulness (Da Silva, 2009; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Sampson, 2014). The distinction of the racial criminal bodies removes these lives in Razack’s words from the reach of humanity and justice (Da Silva, 2007; Razack, 2013).

This question of how certain bodies are distinguished and considered punishable is central to undoing settler colonial power. Da Silva’s concept of raciality is concerned with a productive system of knowledge and thought that through historical intersections generates a penal governance that differentiates and particularizes criminal bodies (Da Silva, 2007; Davis, 2005; Razack, 2014). In this sense, da Silva’s arsenal of ‘raciality’ is not describing a discrete category of ‘race’ as settler colonial power operates intersectionally. In particular, this paper demonstrates how racial penal governance is configured by the interlocking of the racial with systems that negate First Nations laws and knowledge while simultaneously reproducing regimes of gender hierarchy and heteronormative binarism, sexual violence, biopolitical debilitation, structural poverty and economic and political disenfranchisement. I also foreground the racialized hierarchies of nationalist belonging and entitlement that order refugees, immigrants and citizens, and within the various contexts of the colony including communities and households (Liddle, 2014; McQuire, 2018; Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Osborne, Howlett, & Grant-Smith, 2019; Puar, 2017; Razack, 1998; Ritchie, 2017).

This paper applies an intersectional analysis of racial penal governance that centres the unique impact of racial penality on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women. Raciality interlocks with systems of negation of First Nations laws in ways that continue settler colonial removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women from their families, communities and countries, and their forced separation from children that feeds into the difficulties of enacting law and culture (Watson, 2014). The emphasis on interlocking systems of oppression (Razack, 1998; Ritchie, 2017) in this paper incorporates the critiques of Indigenous Australian scholars and Aboriginal Feminisms. This is informed by the writing of Goenpul woman and feminist academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) that critiques white feminist analysis that equalize subject positions as they fail to acknowledge settler colonial relations of ruling within whiteness (pp. xxi–xxii, xvii). It also draws from the critiques of Celeste Liddle (2014) an Arrernte woman and union organizer that outlines an intersectional Aboriginal feminism that centres on Aboriginal women’s unique struggles and challenges the structures inherited by the process of colonization through varied radical feminist tactics. Liddle warns also that these struggles cannot be conflated with those of other racially marginalized groups. Extending Liddle’s call for ‘unique’ struggles, Amy McQuire (2018), a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman and Aboriginal feminist writer, critiques the ways intersectionality has been applied by white feminists to deflect rather than interrogate the way race impacts Aboriginal women’s ‘lived experience[s] of gender, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability’. Above all, McQuire critiques carceral white feminist approaches invested in prisons and police that ‘demonize’ Aboriginal men as violent and the accuse Aboriginal women of ‘neglecting’ children. Importantly, the analysis in this paper is paralleled by the intersectional analysis of how racial penality governs convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women by interrogating the ways settler colonial power biopoliticizes and encapsulates hierarchical and oppositional positionalities of subordination and privilege (Razack, 2008). I am drawing from the abolitionist writing of Andrea Ritchie (2017) to produce a historicized analysis of racial penal governance that is not invested in the carceral state. To borrow from the abolitionist Ritchie (2017, p. 17) words this works helps to expand the understanding of the unique forms and contexts of police and prison violence.

I write this paper as a settler-diaspora on Wangal country whose sovereignty was never ceded. This paper comes from a struggle against my positionality within the settler colony that has selectively opened its racially exclusionary borders to women diaspora like myself under the condition of investing in patriarchal whiteness and its privileges. These are privileges linked to cultural and political assimilation and invested in dispossession and racial penal governance. My struggle starts with a commitment to a decolonial project involved in the undoing of racial penal governance.

Colonial criminality and the Wybalenna prison Camp

Racial penal governance participates in colonial criminality. Criminologist Biko Agozino (2010, p. iii) equates imperialism with crime and argues that ‘punishment operates in an imperialist fashion as it colonizes other processes that are alien to the empire of penalty’. Racial penal governance as a technology of punishment that colonizes pre-existing systems of law by imposing western punishment also works in an imperialist fashion. As Agozino argues it participates in the negation and violation of ‘the spaces of the other and … has the tendency to pose as the moral policeman of the world’ (2010, p. iii). Irene Watson, a woman from the Tanganekald, Meintangk and Boandik First Nations peoples and Professor of law, decenters this imperialist punishment and its legality. By adopting an Aboriginal law viewpoint Watson argues that the Raw Law of First Nations is ‘still existing, living and breathing’ (2014, p. 1) and is still asking the question: ‘by what lawful authority do you come to our lands? What authorizes your efforts to dispossess us of our ancient connections to them?’ (Watson, 2018). This affirmation of the sovereignties of international and local First Nations Raw Law decenters the legality of racial penal governance – the settler colonial project or muldarbi law. It also assesses the impact of the colonial project and declares the criminality of its practices that are shown to have repeatedly violated and denied First Nations Raw Law and failed to uphold their best interests, laws and territories (Watson, 2014, p. 1). Through Raw Law, Watson decolonizes the very foundations of imperialism and settler colonialism that rest on the racial distinction of First Nations peoples as being without law and points to the ways colonial law has negated its crime and obligations to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws and sovereignties.

The racial through punishment becomes the governing relation that institutes the juridical and moral ground of the colony. Racial penal governance invisibilizes colonial crime by partaking in the approximation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ assertions of Raw Law as the criminal and punishable acts. Whilst colonialism works differently across the terrains of Australia, the suspension of the rule of law and the use of terror and violence by colonial authorities is legitimated by the deployment a racial penality that distinguishes and hierarchizes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as racial subjects, affectable, inferior lesser human beings, lawless and criminal but also as the ‘no-bodies’ of the law always at a distance from the reach of justice (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016, p. 48; Da Silva, 2007, p. 233; Razack, 2013). In the conflict zone of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) between 1824 and 1831 racial penal governance responds to assertions of Raw law and requests for justice by the Oyster Bay People, Big River People, Ben Lomond and Northern Midlands Peoples by deploying a series of criminal categories that racially distinguish the warriors and their Peoples as ‘open enemies’, ‘wanton and barbarous’, ‘savages’, ‘murderous’, ‘treacherous’, ‘dangerous’ whilst their assertions of laws are distinguished as ‘aggressions’, ‘felonies’ and ‘riots’ that is as lawless crimes (see Palombo, 2015; Ryan, 2008). Racial penal governance during the events in the Black War in effect grounds these populations in racial criminality in ways that deny and invisibilize pre-existing First Nations laws and annihilates their access to justice through colonial law.

What the Black Wars also assert is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders require constant surveillance. Many survivors of the Black War and members of their communities are relocated to the Wybalenna prison camp at Flinders Island (Reynolds, 2004; Van Toorn, 2006). This Camp is a ‘biopolitical paradigm’ that invisibilizes the lives of its prisoners by restricting people’s movements and exposing the prisoners to a debilitating force of racial penal governance of settler colonial sovereignty. This debilitation oscillates into a necropolitical form of penal intervention that causes the death of most of its prisoners (Agamben, 1998, p. 80, 117; Mbembe, 2003; Palombo, 2015).

Within the Wybalenna camp, the enforcement of gender hierarchies, heteronormative binarism and sexual violence is instrumental to white patriarchal power (Ritchie, 2017, pp. 22–23; Baldry & Cunneen, 2014). The interlockings of racial penality with these systems of gender and sexuality produce a white patriarchal form of control that targets and distinguishes Aboriginal women as racially defective mothers, so that motherhood becomes a site of control, policing and penal intervention. Children in the camp are separated from their mothers (or parents overall) and are exposed to Christian teachings and western education that limits the transfer of cultural knowledge and negates its value. Gender hierarchies are configured by a white patriarchal knowledge that trains girls for domestic servitude and supervises them in cleaning, personal hygiene, laundry and sewing for white settlers and middle-class women in particular (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). The girls’ sexual and intimate relations with white sailors are also controlled by Chief Protector of Aborigines Robinson who interferes in family and community matters by attempting to prohibit inter-racial intimate and sexual relationships with these men by organizing their marriages (Ryan, 2008). In the wake of Australia’s federation and creation of a nation-state in 1901, these gendered and sexual sites of racial penal intervention are expanded by state and federal Protection Legislations that as Cunneen argues, appoints protectors and superintendents (often police) to regulate all aspects of Indigenous people and women’s lives (Cunneen, 2001, pp. 66–75). So, this removal of Aboriginal people from their home-country, interference with motherhood and family formation, the separation from children and inter-racial intimate relations become key sites of racial penal intervention that expand over time.

Moments of appearance within the Wybalenna Camp

Racial penal governance does not eliminate anti-colonial opposition. In the Wybalenna prison Camp, the circulation of The Flinders Island Chronicle (1836-1837) extended the civilizing mission and religious teachings in the camp. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (2015) emphatically argues today that Captain:

George Augustus Robinson tried to ‘civilise and Christianise’ our people. Wybalenna was a place where raytji overseers attempted to destroy our culture, our traditions and our language. They never succeeded. (p. 5)

Marcia Langton (1996), a woman descendant from the Yiman people and Professor of Indigenous Studies describes the Chronicle as a daily reportage that conveys the immediacy and intimacy of the daily living in the Camp. This reportage is shaped by Robinson’s attempts to monitor the publication and to position the knowledge and skills of the Aboriginal Editors in a mediating role between himself and the prisoners within Wybalenna (see Van Toorn, 2006, p. 104). When the poor conditions in the Camp caused an alarming number of deaths in November of 1837, the young Editor Thomas Brune reported on these Black deaths in custody whilst they were occurring:

… Let us hope … that something may be done for us poor people they are dying away the Bible says some of us shall be saved but I am much afraid none of us will be [a]live by and by as there is nothing but sickness among us. Why don't the black fellows pray to the King to get us away from this place.

And my friends hear this I got [w]rite to you the same things over and over again. Commandant has directed me to work and if I don’t attend to it must be put into jail. (reproduced in Rose, 1996, pp. 17–18)

His writing from the inside materializes ‘this place’. It circulates the penal trauma that is created by the living under intense biopolitical intervention that is shown to create ‘nothing but sickness among us’ and the neglect of ‘black fellow’ prisoners. This reporting reveals how necropolitics shapes the civilizing mission of the Camp, making visible that which is invisibilized by settler colonial authorities. Its embodiment of the hope to get away from the camp, with the sense that Thomas Brune is living in fear for his own life and that of other ‘black fellows’ re-defines the terms of the white Christianizing mission of the paper. It appropriates these terms and says what there is to say in Thomas Brune’s terms. As Langton (1996, p. iv) argues this is a moment of ‘plead[ing] and cajole’ from the survivors who also saw ‘inmates die one by one’. This writing becomes part of the ‘tactics of appearance’ as it makes that shows that which is happening to ‘black fellows’ inside the camp to matter (Mirzoeff, 2017). It visibilizes the racial brutality of the prison Camp as a segregated space and makes Black fellow lives appear and matter by asserting an urgent call to live at a moment when the disappearance is imminent.

The debilitation of convict women

The Wybalenna Camp in Tasmania parallels the convict transportation system in the colonies. Convict women transported to Australia are largely perceived to be the ‘poor classes’ of Britain, Scotland and Ireland and were often mothers. Between 1803 and 1853, around 12,500 women are transported to Van Diemen’s Land and some arrived with their children (Maxwell-Stewart, 2015, p. 169; Swiss, 2010). I note here the ways these interlockings created varied positionalities of subordination and privilege, especially when considering the colonial and racial relations with Catholic Irish women (see Malcolm & Hall, 2018). This form of governing by the British state instrumentalizes transportation as part of controlling the growth of its prison population at home and for creating profitability by circulating a convict female labour force necessary for private and public work in the colonies (Dillon, 2008, p. 121; Shaw, 1966). In this sense, I would argue that these lives are distinguished as criminal female bodies from whom profit can be derived and it is this emphasis on punishing and extracting profit by enforcing incarceration and servitude that creates their debility (Puar, 2017, pp. 19–21). The biopolitics of debility establishes that convict female labour is a ‘target for injury’ as their capacity is modulated by Empire as part of the public and private profit of the settler colony (Puar, 2017, p. 69). Mary Hunter from Yorkshire, at the age of 37, was imprisoned and transported for the first offence of stealing after becoming a widow with one child. Police and prison-related records interlock with gender, servitude, poverty, white patriarchal morality and debility that tie Mary to both a category of criminality and work duties, as a convict housemaid (Female Convicts Research Centre, 2019; Fraser, 2014). When finally released from servitude, she was re-incarcerated to hard labour both at Cascade Female Factory and Launceston Female Factory. In 1864, at 51 years Mary identifies herself as ‘destitute’ that is as homeless:

she had no place to go and no money she said she was destitute and had applied for an order to be invalided I brought her here to the Watchhouse. I have known her for some time. She has no means of subsistence. (cited in Fraser, 2014, p. 4)

In this case, Mary has been made part of a precarious population that is created by the biopolitics of racial penal mechanisms and is deployed to support the profitability of Empire and its public and private interests in the settler colony. My point is that convict women’s bodily capacities are modulated over time by their categorization as ‘objects of disposability’ (Puar, 2017, p. 81) whose ‘debility is required’ or necessitated as part of their punishment and for the economic benefit of settler colonialism and Empire. So racial penal governance produces a precarious population exposed to debility.

The arrivals of immigrant women also become subjected to racial penal governance. The establishment of the sovereignty of the modern liberal settler state in 1901 rests on securing an exclusive form of white citizenship through migration control. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (Cth) (IRA) is a racial penal technology that secures the white sovereignty of the settler state by ways of a dictation test and diagnostic screenings (see Pugliese, 2002). This criminalizes non-European migration by prohibiting entry into the country and allowing the deportation of those already here. It also establishes racial criminal categories of desirable and undesirable and legal and illegal migrants. This is a securing Suvendrini Perera argues establishes ‘a hierarchy of belonging and entitlement[s]’ that situates diaspora’s citizenship as one that is ‘derived and asserted in relation to … multiple racial others’ (Perera, 2005, p. 31). The targeting of prostitution as a site of criminality produces the criminalization of an established network of Japanese female sex workers. This prohibits both the arrival and return of these women to Australia so that by 1902 they are embodied as a disappearing problem. Their removal, however, also gives preference to the arrival of European women as there is a visible presence of French and Italian sex workers especially after 1901 (Frances, 2007). What must be noted here is that in the multi-racial spaces of Queensland and Western Australia the local police categorize these European women as desirable precisely because as Frances notes, they are perceived to continue to ‘protect white women (here defined in the narrower, British, sense)’ from the ‘contamination of coloured men’[sic!] (cited in Frances, 2007, p. 106). So, their arrival as non-British, European sex workers is seen as part of ongoing racial penal governing that monitor the inter-racial sexual and intimate relations perceived to be created by prostitution. This policing also extends to prohibit inter-racial sexual relations and family formation involving diasporas from Asian countries and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. So, sexuality is a site of racial penal intervention that secures an exclusive form of white heteronormative citizenship by way of migration control.

As we move to 1901, the focus moves to a penal governance and a carceral politics that work to tie the body to criminality by claiming to identify, predict and calculates ‘the abnormal’ quasi-human, female bodies capable and responsible for crime, the criminal type or the characteristics of the female criminal mind responsible for the ‘social ill’ or ‘criminality’ (see Pugliese, 2010; Spivakovsky, 2014). They are distinguished and categorized as racial, poor, degenerative and defective bodies, that not only commit crimes but also reproduce a ‘criminal race of delinquents’ that threatens the heteronormative white middle-class family unit (Palombo, 2015). These are the female figures of the Natives, Black, Asiatic, non-assimilable Southern Europeans, enemy aliens, dangerous, unfit, insane, feebleminded, idiot, deviant, sick, enemy, unwed mothers, immoral, promiscuous and more (I. Anderson, 1994; B. Anderson, 2013; Coleborne, 2015; Meekosha, 2008; Palombo, 2015; Spivakovsky, 2014). All this work consolidates claims that certain female bodies have a propensity to commit crimes and the need for the state and the law to intervene onto these bodies (see Pugliese, 2010; Spivakovsky, 2014).

Neoliberal governmentality

Raciality is still operating today through the neoliberal racial penal governance of the settler state. It is an ongoing productive governing relation of penal governance that persists despite liberal rejections of race. This denies Raw Law and works to extinguish First Nations ongoing relationships to territories and land by introducing Mabo No.2 (Mabo v Queensland No. 2) 1992 (Clth) and Native Titles Act 1993 (Clth) (Watson, 2014, p. 8). Neoliberal penal governance reconfigures the proximity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to crime and punishment by way of net-widening, transcarceration and intensification of police presence in their everyday living and relations (McQuire, 2018). Yuin woman and researcher Amanda Porter with Chris Cunneen (2018, p. 8) make the point that neoliberal over-policing and incarceration of women remove focus from their ‘disproportionate representation as victims of crime’ and that the law rarely affords them equal protection. It also, brings us to Agozino’s (1997) argument, that we should not take the category of the ‘offender’ and in this case of the ‘risky’ body, as a given. Colonial and current histories demonstrate how racialized lives do not need to have committed a crime to receive punishment. This is especially visible when considering the growing hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls, especially those affected by poverty and managing mental health and addictions and multiple and intersectional forms of abuse and violence (Cunneen, Baldry, Brown, Steel, & Brown, 2013; McQuire, 2018). These are differentiated as risky female bodies, governable sites of criminality requiring ‘amenable’ targeted interventions (Hannah-Moffat, 2004) a differentiation resting on the evocation of the modern figure of the defective racial female body which is now individualized and re-categorized as a risky female body. This category negates racialization and its intersectionalities and the ongoing settler colonial relations (Spivakovsky, 2016, pp. 21–22).

This raciality however, is also visible by the fact that there is a lack of national outrage at the news that twenty-five years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Indigenous women (and men) are still dying and under similar circumstances, mainly in police custody and arrested for minor offences and through events deemed ‘preventable’ (Cunneen & Porter, 2018, p. 7). This lack of outrage at these deaths, as Da Silva (2007, p. xiv) argues, is partly due to the ways social scientific knowledge of raciality still justifies ‘the violent deaths of people of color’, as it ‘renders them expected but also justified’ in the sense of being forecasted and a death that no one could prevent or cause (Razack, 2014, p. 4). Neoliberal racial penal governance reconfigures the criminalization of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women as it participates in the racial project of the settler state.

A (trans) national neoliberal order since the late 1990s has relied on the state, the juridico-legal and capitalism to re-configure penal forms of governmentality. This reconfiguration since the post 9/11 war on terror and Tampa Affair has re-defined citizenship and entry to Australia as sites of securitization and racial penal intervention. In particular, the adoption of preventive and pre-empting models of security has increased the policing and usage of counter-terrorist techniques against Muslim Australians defined as a risky population and the more recent intervention in the daily living of Muslim women (see Hussein, 2019; Poynting, 2015). Under the pre-emptive model of security, deterrence is also a key technology of racial penal governmentality that has introduced the outright refusal of entry to refugees, mandatory and indefinite incarceration, temporary protection and the prohibition of family reunion (Bui et al., 2018; Perera & Pugliese, 2012). This is implemented by for-profit transnational security corporations that are already profiteering from their participating in the US prison industrial complex, Australian prisons and correctional services (see Green, Inch, Kitamura, & Kospic, 2014). In the spaces of the prison camps of Nauru, Christmas Island and Manus, the racial criminalization of refugees as ‘illegals’ has invisibilized their motives for seeking asylum and these lives are (re)opened to trauma by proximity and/or direct exposure to racial violence, sexual violence, homophobia and transphobia (see Boochani, 2018; Bui et al., 2018). Debility is created by the merging of state-based deterrence with profiteering in ways that purposefully regulate the living conditions and level of support made available in the camps, including by the outright refusal of health. So, in this sense, the Camp establishes the conditions for a ‘precarious’ population, whose affective bodily capacities are not a by-product of biopolitics, but an intended result of a racial capitalism embedded in deterrence. Similarly, to the deaths in custody of Indigenous women, there is no national outrage at indefinite incarceration and the deaths in custody in detention centres as they are racialized as inevitable events.

Moments of Appearance

In a recent collaborative community multisensory installation Sorry for your Loss, there is a remembering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who died in custody.⁴ By asserting the ‘belonging, family and place’ of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who lost their lives in custody (Behrendt & Clague, 2018, p. 3) the installation creates a space for continuing decolonization. This creativity with the talking back, hearing and sharing offer an opportunity to appear and make matter the lives that have been segregated and disappeared in the prison industrial complex. Without conflating the unique aims and achievements of this installation with the aim of this paper, I draw from its emphasis on ‘talking back to institutions with the aim of building communities rather than prisons’ to consider moments of appearance within prisons invisibilized by racial penal governance. Following from the earlier analysis of the writing by Thomas Brune at the Wybalenna Camp that made ‘black fellow’ life in prison matter, this section responds to neoliberal racial penal governance by opening up to the moments of appearance as discussed by Zoe, Alison and Pamela. These are the moments that make their disappearance in prison appear and matter.

Prison is not corrective

Zoe describes herself as a diasporic Greek-Australian mum who supports people affected by the criminal justice system. She is managing health issues and complex history of abuse (Zoe, personal communication, May 2016). When Zoe speaks about her first night in prison there is an affective disclosure of the trauma lived within the prison cell. As Zoe persuasively shows, ‘prisons are not corrective’. They do not provide safety, as they are spaces that securitize the circulation of an authorized penal violence that as Zoe demonstrates interlocks and is in continuity with the racial, gender and sexual violence of the social sphere (Razack, 2013; Richie, 2012). The precarious existence under the intense surveillance of the prison cell is what is materialized here. Zoe recounts this existence in the space of non-appearance, the prison cell:

Prison is not corrective. Having the cameras in my cell … on my shower, on my toilet and my bed … I was forced to ask myself “are they going to watch my body now?” Okay have a look at it [then].

So, it’s like it made me think even though I didn’t voice it to anybody it’s my body again that it on show here … but that’s how I thought, my whole life. (Zoe, personal communication, May 2016)

It is a moment selected by Zoe that makes the ways of precarity appear. The violence of the surveillance imposed by the cameras in the prison cell interlocks and extends the sexual embodiments that have taken place in the domestic, community and social spheres (Richie, 2012). What is made to appear then is the ways sexuality continues to be a key site of racial penal intervention in diasporic women’s lives, and that prisons are spaces where sexual violence is intensified. One point to note here is that Australian-born diasporas are not visible in the prison-related data. As Debbie Kilroy observes, they ‘become Australian’ in prisons (D. Kilroy, Sisters Inside, personal communication, July 2018). So, this appearance is one that rejects the creation of a distance between the domestic, community and social spheres and the prison industrial complex, as it visibilizes the continuity between these spheres and the ways they uniquely embody and criminalize Zoe as a female Greek-Australian diasporic mum. Kilroy (2016, p. 5) has long reported that around 80% of women in prison are victims of various forms of abuse and that imprisonment practices ‘replicate characteristics of violent family situations. They are based on rigid rules, imposed by authority figures (often in an arbitrary manner), and requiring absolute obedience’. This appearance of prison-practices, therefore, is shown not to rehabilitate Zoe as it intensifies existing forms of violence.

Prison is rough

Alison describes herself as a mum who is working through the complexities of the criminal legal system and living without drugs. She grew up in a loving family although her father was selling drugs. As Alison demonstrates, prison is rough. Her testimonial is an affective embodiment of what there is to say on prison life that counters the creation of a social distance from the violence inside prisons (Mirzoeff, 2017). This visibilizes how, under neoliberal racial penal governance of prisons, those criminalized as risky female bodies living illegally with drugs are exposed to a biopolitical intervention that punishes and injures their bodies. This punishment injures Alison:

Prison is rough. There are lots of rapes that happen in women’s prison that are never spoken about. Because there’s lot overdoses that are never spoken about and lots of suicides that are never spoken about and the support that we get from the nurses is absolute shit. Excuse my language.

But they took two of my wisdom teeth out and I told them I had never had teeth pulled before. They took two of my wisdom teeth out and I asked them for Panadol when I had left. He told me to suck it up. I went back to my room and I bunked up for two hours crying. My body went into shock. I was shaking, I couldn’t stand the pain. And they wouldn’t bring me anything. They turned my intercom off. Two wisdom teeth!

Yeah, it happens to so many women. They come to give your medication and [if] you’re not dressed how they want you to be dressed … they won’t give us the medication. (Alison, personal communication, May, 2014)

Visibilizing the roughness of everyday penal living makes appear the injuries done to Alison. Her affective embodiment of these moments materializes the ways the lack of care from medical staff in prison creates a precarity, a population living this way (Puar, 2017). The appearance of this lack of care in prison confirms, as Baldry (2009, p. 8) emphatically sums up, that medical assistance is not effective. As prisons are a space of ‘punishment’ that remains antithetical to the notion of operating as a ‘therapeutic community’. Drawing from Scraton (2016), this lack of appropriate health care continued what Alison received as a child and exposed her to ongoing medicalization, aggravated by her imprisonment. Alison’s selection and recounting of this traumatic moment more specifically makes appear her affective bodily response to the refusal of providing pain relief, and by so doing makes matter the brutality of prison life.

Prison is traumatizing

Pamela describes herself as cherishing being the mum of a newborn, and as currently working to regain custody of her children. Without disclosing her full details, Pamela (self) identifies as an Aboriginal woman living a family and communal life in a small town. She grew up in a loving family that, however, was affected by drug addiction. In the following extract, Pamela exposes the trauma of child removal. It visibilizes the living with grief in prison while the children are stolen from her. The violence attached to her existence in the racialized gender category of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander female criminal is made to matter. The ways the forced separation and removal occurred is significant:

I went to prison so my ex mother in law had to come and take the kids and when I was in prison [and]she didn’t want to give them back.

I went without seeing my kids for 19 months and when they finally did visit, I got to see them for 40 minutes. That’s traumatizing … So long without seeing them.

But I’ve always been a good mum to my children. My mother in law knows that. (Pamela, personal communication, May 2014)

This appearance counters the penal settler colonial imaginary that traumatizes Pamela. By visibilizing herself as a good mum and sharing her ongoing assertions of motherhood while in prison, this appearance speaks back to a penal settler colonial state that supports Pamela’s mother in law and her disparagement and discouragement of her role as a mother. In this racial penal colonial imaginary Pamela’s mother in law ‘can’t imagine Aboriginal [women] as being other than victims or perpetrators of crime, they can’t imagine us managing our lives well because they don't see that’ (M. Lucashenko, Sisters Inside, personal communication, July 2018). This is a testimonial that exposes the ways neoliberal racial penal governance punishes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women by locking their lives into a settler colonial order that still attempts to isolate and interfere in their relations with children, families and communities.

Conclusion

It is with these practices of appearances in mind that I bring closure to this analysis that begins to demonstrate what is secured when Universities and their communities invisibilize everyday penal living. Universities participate in the workings of racial penal governance that attempt to make targeted lives disappear in criminality. This historical analysis has revealed the deployment of raciality as a governing relation of penality and demonstrated how settler colonialism rejects its own criminality and instrumentalizes crime, criminality and punishment to disappear the exercise of Indigenous laws and sovereignties. This exposes settler colonial power as secured by the interlockings of racial penal governance with whiteness, gender hierarchies and heteronormative binarism, sexual violence, biopolitical debilitation, poverty and (racialized) hierarchies of nationalist belonging and entitlement. The paper shows how these interlockings disappear the assertion of cultural knowledges on everyday relations involving families, communities, laws and sovereignty by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. This disappearing remains at the centre of a neoliberal racial penal governance and is part of the intensification in the attempts to invisibilize the lives of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and especially mothers and women managing poverty, addictions, mental health and homelessness.

The paper has argued that the securing of the settler state by the denial of Indigenous laws and sovereignties continues at the border through the criminalization of migration and citizenship. The interlockings of racial penal governance produce hierarchies of belonging and entitlements that disappear racialized diasporic women by prohibiting the entry of new arrivals and deporting migrants with ongoing relations in the settler colony. The settler colonial state also profits historically from the creation of a class of poor, and white female convicts whose lives through forced migration is constantly exposed to debilitation and incarceration. This biopolitics of debility is re-created by neoliberal penal governance by the merging of state-based deterrence with profiteering that regulates the living conditions of refugees, including by the outright refusal of health care provisions. Racial penal governance rests on disappearing, eliminating and debilitating lives as part of the securing and profiteering of the settler state and its participation in global capitalism.

Finally, this paper interrupts racial penal governance. This writing is part of an act of love that is based on ‘mourning and honouring and struggle’ with others as it attempts to navigate and contribute to the varied and multifaceted aim for removing the prison complex. It engages with historical and more recent moments of appearance as created by the testimonials of Thomas Brune and Zoe, Alison and Pamela. Their recounts make appear moments of their lives in the prison Camp and neoliberal prison that racial penal governance attempts to disappear. Thomas Brune’s writing makes ‘black fellow’ life in prison matter. This appears that which is invisibilized by settler colonial authorities and the ways necropolitics shaped the civilizing mission of the prison Camp. The extract from Zoe is a testimonial that makes visible the continuity between the level of control that she experienced in the prison space and the violence lived in the domestic, community and social spheres. Alison’s recounts embody the affective trauma of the debility created by the lack of care in the everyday penal living. And when Pamela recounts her grief in prison, she also speaks back to a penal settler colonial violence that through incarceration disappears her role as a mother. These are all embodied ‘moments of appearance’ that materially name and interrogate penal violence. These appearances in their distinct ways, make their lives in prisons appear and mostly reject the Camps and prisons as unsafe spaces, that opens these lives to death, grief, debility and trauma.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous referees for their guidance. A special thank you to the women who shared and trusted me with their life-narratives. I would also like to thank and acknowledge the inspirational work of WIPAN and Sisters Inside. I am really grateful for the feedback and encouragement received by Stephen Houston, Nicole Matthews, Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese. Finally, a very special thank you to the co-editors of this edition, Maria Giannacopoulos and Biko Agozino.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Palombo

Lara Palombo is a casual Lecturer and Tutor at the University of Macquarie and Western Sydney University in the areas of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Criminology. Her PhD focussed on indefinite imprisonment in racial Camps of the settler colony of Australia. She has published in a number of journals including Journal of Global Indigeneity (2019), Journal of Intercultural Studies (2014), and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2009). Lara is a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the website Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. She is also a member of the Women’s Justice Network (previously known as Women in Prison Advocacy Network).

Notes

1 Note here that I will be using his European name because his birth name and country are unknown (see also Stevens, 2017).

2 To protect participants' confidentiality, pseudonyms are used throughout this article

3 The oral interviews were conducted with permission at the Women in Prison Advocacy Network and co-presented with Lana Sanders as ‘Punishable bodies and Racial Penal Governance’ at Is Prison Obsolete Conference, Sisters Inside, 19–21 October, 2016.

4 Sorry for Your Loss, Exhibition, 30 May–10 June 2018, Boomali Gallery, Sydney. Created by Jumbunna Research by Professor Larissa Behrendt and Associate Professor Pauline Clague, Dr Romaine Moreton and Dr Lou Bennett. It is described as ‘a collaborative community driven multisensory installation work giving voice to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who have lost their lives in custody. We are more than statistics, we are more mothers, sisters and daughters. We have belonging, family and place Our absence does not go unnoticed, we do not just disappear, we will remembers’ (Behrendt & Clague, 2018, p. 3). For more details see also https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/jumbunna-institute-indigenous-education-and-research/news-and-11.