Chapter 8: Politics and Democracy: Opening Up the Community Sanctions Landscape

One of the key aims of our research and this book is to develop a better, more democratic politics around the criminal legal system generally and community sanctions in particular. This aspiration accords with our general disposition as criminological researchers and activists. In this chapter we discuss two interlinked aspects of the politics and democracy debates: the debate around the need for a ‘public criminology’ which does not try to shield criminal law processes from the public and is deliberative and a consideration of whether notions such as ‘diminished citizenship’, ‘carceral citizenship’ and ‘discursive citizenship’ are helpful in advancing the struggle over community corrections, particularly in relation to Aboriginal peoples and other marginalised groups.