Manufactured Consent: Carceral Logic in Victoria

Sheena Colquhoun || As a response to supposedly skyrocketing crime rates in Victoria, the State Government is now boasting the “toughest bail laws in Australia.” Repealed bail provisions were rushed through Parliament earlier this year, accompanied by a $727 million commitment to “ramp up capacity” in Victorian prisons. This came despite widespread community opposition, most notably from Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, who have long warned that Aboriginal communities — and particularly women — will bear the brunt of harsher bail regimes.

The Government’s “tough on crime” push diverts attention from a simpler explanation for rising crime: people are stealing to survive. The Crime Statistics Agency reports that shoplifting is at its highest level since records began, driven largely by the theft of food and alcohol. Retailers across regional Victoria say cases have almost doubled since 2022, a trend police and traders alike attribute to soaring grocery bills and rent stress. Victoria Police themselves conceded last month that “cost-of-living stress is helping to fuel unacceptably high crime rates,” with retail and car theft “contributing to the highest number of offences recorded” in a decade.

The Allen Government’s 2025–26 Budget assured the public that “every Victorian deserves to feel safe in their home, and in their community.” Yet this seemingly facile statement does a great deal of ideological work. For tens of thousands of people on Victoria’s public housing waitlist, and for those sleeping rough or living in dangerous, overcrowded and insecure accommodation, there is no “home” in which to feel safe.

The government’s refrain of “community safety” is also a hollow promise for many Aboriginal people and those living in poverty, for whom police presence means harassment, surveillance, and the very real risk of incarceration and death.

The 2023 coronial finding into the horrific and entirely avoidable death of Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman Veronica Nelson described the state’s bail laws as a “complete and unmitigated disaster,” noting they criminalise poverty and disproportionately cage Aboriginal women. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and scores of Aboriginal organisations have warned that each new tightening of bail and sentencing powers deepens this racial captivity rather than preventing harm. The distinction between Victorian communities deemed worthy of safety and Victorian communities targeted by state violence is profoundly racial.

Abolition-economics scholars remind us that prisons in settler colonies do more than punish; they manage the racial inequalities produced by ongoing dispossession. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, capitalism depends on inequality and racism secures it. Aboriginal people make up less than 1 per cent of Victoria’s population, yet account for over 10 per cent of the adult prison population. The criminal-legal system has become a primary mechanism for governing the peoples and lands never ceded.

Rising remand numbers are therefore not a policy glitch: they are the predictable outcome of a colonial economy that treats imprisonment as a solution to the social wreckage it creates. The work of imagining a world without prisons is deliberately challenging. Gibson-Light and Goodman call this manufacturing of consent for state violence “carceral hegemony”. In The Consent of the Punished, they argue that this consent operates across four levels: those who govern (including state and private actors), those who are governed, prison workers, and the incarcerated themselves.

The Allen Government’s “Keeping Communities Safe” narrative exemplifies the first two planes, manufacturing popular consent for punitive spending through scare tactics that individualise crime, while obscuring the criminalisation of poverty and creation of systemic insecurity.

The collapsing of “home” and “safety” into a singular promise works ideologically to justify investment in policing and prisons, while displacing blame for precarity onto those most marginalised. This framing is especially fraught in a capitalist system that defines the home primarily as private property or a financial and tradeable asset, rather than a social right. When housing is commodified, safety becomes something to be purchased, not guaranteed.

The government’s “Keeping communities safe” pledge rings hollow considering its decision to demolish all forty-four public housing towers across Melbourne. These towers are home to thousands of families, many of whom will be displaced under the guise of “renewal”, while public land is handed over to private developers. It is precisely the absence of stable housing that denies many people access to bail, parole, or community-based sentences.

Women, especially Aboriginal women, are routinely held on remand for no reason other than not having a fixed address. In 2021–22, more than half of parole denials in Victoria cited housing instability as the key barrier. As Russell, Carlton, and Tyson argue, homelessness is the most significant barrier to bail for women, who are often denied release simply because magistrates deem them incapable of complying with conditions while “couch surfing” or living in their cars.

In some cases, women avoid applying for bail altogether due to a complete lack of safe alternatives to prison, with one lawyer noting clients preferred prison because “this is four walls and it’s a feed.” This should not be mistaken for institutional care, it is evidence of the punitive use of carceral systems to mask deep social failure.

But at the same time as the Allan Government claims to prioritise “early intervention” and “prevention” as strategies to address youth offending, it has slashed $2.4 billion from public education funding. While the Government endorses prevention at face value, it materially invests in carceral expansion.

Public consent to the carceral project is an expensive lie to maintain. It is built through rhetoric, policy, and the circulation of fear-based narratives. But it is a house of cards all the same. As Gramsci wrote, crises reveal the exhaustion of old ideas and the opening for new ones. The logic of punishment-as-care, which frames prisons as treatment centres and refuges for the homeless, is collapsing under its own contradiction.

Governments justify carceral expansion with narratives of risk, individual failure, and the need for protection, while systematically dismantling the material conditions that make safety possible, and criminalising those left in poverty. The state demolishes public housing, defunds education, and relies on imprisonment to manage the social consequences.

“Every Victorian deserves to feel safe in their home, and in their community.” But safety has never been created through punishment. Incarceration is not a response to harm — it is the continuation of it. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, abolition is about presence, not absence. It is about building life-affirming institutions. In place of carceral hegemony, we can build solidarities rooted in mutual care, collective responsibility, and the belief that everyone deserves to live free from violence, including the violence of the state.