Chapter 5: ‘Less Than More Likely Than Not’: Risk Mentalities, Technologies and Practices

As we've noted, risk mentalities, technologies and practices have permeated prison regimes and community sanctions and are now central to the administration of criminal legal systems throughout the world (Feeley & Simon, 1992; O'Malley, 2008; Pratt & Anderson, 2020; Trotter, McIvor, & McNeill, 2016). At almost every turn in the system, risk assessments are used to inform institutional decision-making which has significant impacts on individuals as they move through these systems, from policing practices and bail, to sentencing, prison classification, rehabilitation programming, parole release, as well as the intensity and length of community-based supervision.

The ascendancy of risk management and the influence of managerial thinking are amongst the most significant shifts in penal culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Garland, 2001a). In Australia, while crime rates have fallen in most categories over the past decade (ABS, 2021a, 2021b), political leaders have emphasised reducing reoffending as a key objective and, along with correctional administrators, have embraced risk-based governance as an ostensibly evidence-based approach to achieve that end. As we showed in the previous chapter, public and political discourse around particular ‘signal’ cases have shaped policies and practices of community sanctions and further embedded risk-based governance.