Spectres of Risk: An Ethnography of Australian Bail Courts

Event Description

In Australia, the number of people imprisoned on remand has tripled in the past two decades, establishing a remand rate that outstrips Canada, the UK and all Western Europe. Australia’s remand ‘boom’ has been facilitated by hyperactive bail reform cycles that have sacrificed individual rights on the altar of community safety. In turn, bail decisions have come to be seen as a crucial node in the ‘war on crime’, as bail courts are tasked with assessing and managing the subjective ‘risk’ of future non-compliance amongst the criminalised masses.

This lecture, co-presented with the UBC Criminal Law Club, explores how imaginaries of ‘risk’ enliven bail decision-making processes on the ground. Drawing on emerging findings from an ethnographic study of two Australian bail courts, Dr. Emma Russell examines how ‘risk’ is a flexible technology for governing social precarity and cultural norms. Tasked not with eliminating ‘risk’ but managing it, she highlights how bail decisions require the construction of a version of ‘risk’ that is morally and politically ‘acceptable’. Far from straightforward or fixed, assessments of ‘risk’ in the bail court are produced and negotiated through inter- and extra-court processes, including narrative contests between prosecutors and defence council, police practices, and the wider ‘penal climate’.

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Speaker

Dr. Emma Russell is an Associate Professor of Crime, Justice and Legal Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, which is located on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. She is a critical criminologist and carceral geographer whose research focuses on prisons, policing and anti-carceral resistance. Emma is the author of Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing (2020) and co-author (with Bree Carlton) of Resisting Carceral Violence: Women’s Imprisonment and the Politics of Abolition (2018). She is involved in various local coalitions against prison expansion and hyper-criminalisation. In 2024-2026, Emma is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow on ‘New Bail Regimes: Reconceptualising Risk to Reduce Remand Imprisonment’.