Chapter 6: Containing the Undesirables: Discretion and the Sentencing of Habitual Criminals in Australian Supreme Courts in the Twentieth Century

On 19 May 1941, 47-year-old Albert Joseph Ward appeared in the Queensland Supreme Court, pleading guilty to ‘breaking, entering and stealing’ five pounds from the Canton Café in South Brisbane.¹ Ward was only recently released from Brisbane's ‘Boggo Road’ jail after serving 15 months imprisonment for a burglary committed the year before.² Crown Prosecutor Joseph Sheehy referred to Ward's ‘very bad record’ since 1919, providing Queensland Supreme Court Justice Roslyn Philp with a list of 25 prior convictions across four Australian states.³ Although most of Ward's imprisonment sentences were relatively short periods in detention – the exception being five years' imprisonment and a flogging sentence in Victoria – Justice Philp regarded Ward as ‘an habitual criminal… if ever a man was one’.⁴ On 3 June 1941, Philp sentenced Ward to 12 months' imprisonment with hard labour and as part of that sentence declared him a habitual criminal.⁵