This article seeks to enhance criminology’s understanding of the disability group home as a targeted site for confining and regulating disabled bodies. In particular, it seeks to extend criminology’s burgeoning understanding of the archipelago of confinement and control, and build upon others’ observations that within this archipelago, the penal has become mobile through site, and the carceral mobile through (disabled) body. The article shows how group homes serve a dual purpose and are marked by an uneven, bifurcated practice. For the vast majority of residents, group homes share little in common with other sites of confinement, but for a select few they can become multilayered sites of confinement and control, containing people first through the site of the group home itself, and then through the site of the person’s disabled body (with all that the designation of disability permits under law). Data supporting the analysis are drawn from the Australian state of Victoria and includes both government documents, as well as transcripts from interviews with 12 stakeholders who provide services and support to people with disability residing within group homes.

In the last decade, criminology has begun to raise concerns about people with disabilities’ problematic relationship with criminal justice systems. Yet we have ignored their problematic relationship with civil justice systems; a relationship which has seen people with disabilities subject to a range of punitive civil controls in the wake of their deinstitutionalisation. This article draws attention to one such punitive civil control, the Supervised Treatment Order regime in the Australian state of Victoria. Drawing on Foucault and his interlocutors’ work on ‘governmentality’, and engaging with Cohen’s concept of ‘magical legalisms’, the article reveals how this civil regime has become an effective mechanism for governing the lives of sex offenders with disabilities post their release from criminal justice systems. The article illuminates how this unusual function of the regime has not only been obscured from criminology’s view through claims of legislative intent, but further reconstituted as protective of people with disabilities’ human rights. The article concludes by discussing the implications of criminology’s absence from engaging with such punitive civil orders for people with disabilities and the wider penal field.

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