Community-based corrections / justice

The decision of whether to imprison offenders or “correct” their behaviour in the community in response to offending is a serious and equally contentious one, highlighting key challenges in the intersections between sentencing and corrections, as well as the much broader notion of justice. Community-based corrections lies at the heart of these intersections, functioning in a landscape influenced by the vagaries of political agenda, shifting theoretical and empirical knowledge-bases, and the increasing role that public opinion – influenced itself, by the media – plays in contemporary Australian criminal justice.

This chapter examines the often complicated terrain of community-based corrections to provide a broad overview, examining a range of theoretical and pragmatic issues that impact upon its practice and, importantly, how it is perceived both from within, and outside the criminal justice system...