Sentencing, Domestic Violence, and the Overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians: Does Court Location Matter?

The significant overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Australian prisons has been the subject of numerous studies. In this article, we build on recent research suggesting that sentencing in domestic violence cases might be an important contributor to this overrepresentation of Indigenous people. We broaden the existing research by examining differences for Indigenous and non-Indigenous defendants in domestic violence cases across a range of sentencing outcomes including imprisonment, probation, fines, and good behavior orders. We also consider whether the degree of geographic remoteness of the court influences these sentencing outcomes. To accomplish this, we use administrative court data from Queensland, Australia, and employ a multinomial hierarchical modeling strategy appropriate for nested court-level multilevel data. The findings further support recent Australian research suggesting that there are sentencing disparities for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in relation to domestic violence, and in particular, that harsher sentences such as imprisonment are disproportionately reserved for Indigenous defendants. Our research demonstrates that these disparities in the likelihood of imprisonment occur irrespective of defendants’ domestic violence protection order (DVO) breach histories and the location of the sentencing court. Based on the findings, we conclude with a discussion of possible ways forward. Although there is no question that Indigenous women should be safe and free from violence, supporting a harsher sentencing regime for those who breach DVOs is not effective. Instead, we argue that flexible strategies that work within and for Indigenous communities in Australia are required

Giappone: Il futuro del passato, Atti del XXI Convegno di Studi Giapponesi

This article investigates changes in life satisfaction across the retirement transition. Retirement is an important life course transition, potentially involving major changes to an individual’s economic and social circumstances. This research contributes to a better understanding of the retirement experience in Australian society by identifying variations in life satisfaction following retirement and the individual characteristics associated with these variations. Latent growth mixture models were used to analyze data from the first 11 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey and included 724 people who made a single transition into retirement. Some retirees maintained high life satisfaction across the retirement transition (40%), others experienced declining levels of life satisfaction from a high level prior to retirement (28%), some experienced increasing life satisfaction from a low level prior to retirement (14%), while another group reported a declining low level of life satisfaction (18%). These results indicate considerable diversity in life satisfaction that is masked by analyses that focus on overall averages. Individuals who experience significant declines in life satisfaction tend to have worse health and lower access to a range of social and economic resources compared to other groups. We conclude that retirement is not a uniform experience and that changes in life satisfaction over the retirement transition are associated with both pre- and post retirement experiences