Around the same time that we began work on this project, the Queensland Labor government was in the process of introducing amendments to its Youth Justice Act, targeted at addressing “community concerns” about safety and security in the North Queensland cities of Townsville and Cairns. The “concerned community” afraid for its safety predominantly consisted of middle-class white constituents whose fears of “out-of-control” young people and recidivist “crime waves” were articulated in (explicitly racist) terms of property damage and urban decay. Concerns around “community safety” are often underpinned by both racial and spatial logics of threat, control, and progress and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as well as other over-policed and criminalised people, are positioned not just as a threat to white safety, but as a barrier to the prosperity of the city itself.
These are not new trends – city-making and criminalisation of ‘unwanted’ people have always been intertwined in the colony. Yet the histories of this connection remain under-explored. In this paper we take a localised and historical approach to the linkage between carceral expansion and visions of urban development by examining the relationship between Parramatta Gaol and the city of Parramatta at the turn of the nineteenth century (covering the 1880s-1920s). Drawing on diverse archival material, including prison entrance diaries, correspondence logs, prisoner identity documents, the NSW police gazette, urban planning materials, media reporting, and legislation, we take initial steps at unpacking the tight and complex relationship between the Gaol and the city that was being built around it. Through close examination of the political, economic, social, racial, and spatial functions of Parramatta Gaol in the production and maintenance of the emerging city of Parramatta we hope to further our ability to challenge the persistent and ever-expanding carcerality of settler cities in their contemporary form.