Punishment and imprisonment in New South Wales: towards a conceptual analysis of purpose

This research conducts a conceptual and qualitative investigation into the practices,rationales and functions of imprisonment in NSW. A specific system of imprisonment,in this case the prisons operated by the NSW Department of Corrective services, isexplored in order to examine the practices, processes and justifications for incarceration. The variouspurposes, theories, rhetorics, practices and contradictions of the prison system in NSW and the ways in whichthe people who are responsible for the administration of this system make sense of its operations and itsincoherencies, are central to this analysis.This research utilises a hybrid methodology involving aspects of content analysis and grounded theory. At thecentre of this research are eight interviews with senior NSW Corrective Services staff. This analysis issupplemented by interview with ex-prisoners, and other people familiar with, but not working for CorrectiveServices. In addition a documentary analysis of both Corrective Services documents, and external literatureexamining NSW prison is carried out.The findings of these analyses are then explored with reference to both their internal coherency, as well astheir relationship to a range of theoretical frameworks. The thesis connects abstract and philosophicalquestions of punishment and penalty with the logistics of running the prison system in NSW. This researchfound a diversity of practices, understandings and justifications of imprisonment which connected toparticular cultural, social philosophical and structural trends. These included victimary discourses, therhetoric of progress, the influence of managerialism, the faith in ‘objective’ professionals, the increasingemphasis on empiricism, the conflicts between coercive practices and individual responsibility, theconstruction of prisoners as dangerous, and an ongoing struggle for purpose. Imprisonment in NSW wasfound to be characterised by discrepancies between the intentions of its administrators and pragmatics of itspractice, conflicts between internal explanations of its purpose, as well as contradictions between internalCorrective Services accounts and external expectations about the roles, functions and practices ofimprisonment. Theoretical perspectives explaining why these characterise imprisonment in NSW weredeveloped. These perspective include the ‘ought/is’ confusion of penal administrators, the inhumanity ofhumane containment, the myth of technocratic amorality, and the sedimentation of purpose