Post-sentence supervision orders in Australia: An instrument of perpetual re-criminalisation

New generation post-sentence preventive detention and supervision regimes recently enacted in Australia are a hybrid of civil and penal law elements. The laws allow for the correctional supervision, in prison or the community, of certain offenders deemed serious or high-risk at completion of their sentences – what amounts to an exceptional expansion of penal power beyond conventional notions of punishment and justified in the interest of community protection. In this article, these regimes are examined as a distinctive modality of criminalisation and penal power. Where most attention tends to be on post-sentence detention, we focus on supervision orders, which are far more common in Australia, yet their current administration and impacts are widely overlooked in the critical literature. Our study reveals that they play a crucial, and largely hidden, role in re-criminalising some individuals while arguably doing little that is positive to protect the community.