Choreographing Carceral Consent: How Local Communities are Enlisted in New Prison Projects in Regional Australia

• In Event: Abandonment, Criminalization, Development: Geographies of Carceral Expansion in Three Countries

Abstract

Australia now incarcerates a greater share of its population than ever before. In the populous southeastern state of Victoria, incarceration has been seized by state planners as major infrastructure project opportunities, purporting to stimulate job creation in regions precipitously managing the decline of traditional manufacturing and agricultural land use. In this paper, I explore the role of official community consultation exercises in carceral planning initiatives by delving into the infrastructural archives of Australia’s newest ‘mega-prison’, the Western Plains Correctional Centre, sited on Wadawurrung land to the west of Melbourne. Analysing the siting approval process and the meeting records of the ‘Community Advisory Group’ for the new prison project, I show how elite actors normalise and reproduce incarceration through techniques of obfuscation, expediation, pacification and persuasion. This reveals how carceral infrastructural planning generates its own logics and cultures at the local level, as it actively forges punishment futures in regional Australia – while foreclosing others.

Author

• Emma Russell, La Trobe University