U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Community-Based Strategies in Aboriginal Criminal Justice: The Northern Territory Experience

NCJ Number
156409
Journal
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology Volume: 28 Issue: 2 Dated: (June 1995) Pages: 127-142
Author(s)
W Tyler
Date Published
1995
Length
16 pages
Annotation
Recent attempts to involve remote communities of Northern Australia in their own policing and correctional services have often been held up as a model for developing aboriginal criminal justice policies.
Abstract
These attempts, however, raise important questions about the construction of the postcolonial community in remote Australia and the sociological principles by which criminal justice schemes such as night patrols, community wardens, and community corrections have been constituted. The construction of the aboriginal community over the past 20 years is explored in terms of ethnographic, politico-administrative, and postmodernist periods, as a background to the development and implementation of community-based criminal justice in the Northern Territory. A typology of postcolonial criminal justice strategies is developed which identifies four ideal categories in which these strategies may be positioned: (1) mediative (night patrols and community wardens); (2) educative (community justice programs); (3) neocolonialist (new forms of imposed European law and policing); and (4) incorporative (pervasive and totalizing forms of control). The possibility of using Northern Territory schemes in other aboriginal situations is critically evaluated in light of differing sociopolitical constructions of community. 42 references and 2 figures