The international criminology and social policy literature have long explored possible connections between social welfare and crime. However, existing studies tend towards high-level comparisons of crime versus total aggregate welfare spend, overlooking sub-national contextual differences between and within countries. There are also few studies that deeply explore this link in the Antipodes, including in Australia: a settler colony and (neo)liberal welfare state with a recent strong coupling of punitive social and penal policies that disproportionately impact Indigenous populations. This paper attends to these gaps by examining the welfare-crime link in remote Indigenous Queensland (Australia). We use crime-report data and an interrupted time series design to explore the effects of dynamic social welfare policies during 2020–2021: a period that saw a temporary shift away from a strict neoliberal welfare model (i.e., heavy conditionality, low benefit rates) to more supportive and decommodifying social welfare in response to the COVID-19 induced economic recession. Our findings align with previous studies that suggest more supportive and decommodifying policies are associated with lower crime. We also bring greater nuance to how the crime-welfare link is understood within the ‘structural complexity of [Australian] settler colonialism’ (Wolfe. Journal of Genocide Research. 2006;8:392), by illuminating how a politics of race animates social policies that can either produce or reduce criminogenic strains and, thus, socially construct crime in the image of the Indigenous ‘Other’.

中文翻译：

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探索紧张的政治：偏远澳大利亚原住民的犯罪和福利

国际犯罪学和社会政策文献长期以来一直在探索社会福利与犯罪之间可能存在的联系。然而，现有研究倾向于对犯罪与总福利支出进行高级比较，忽略了地方之间和内部的环境差异国家。也很少有研究深入探讨 Antipodes 中的这种联系，包括在澳大利亚：定居者殖民地和（新）自由主义福利国家与最近对土着人口产生不成比例影响的惩罚性社会和刑事政策的强烈结合。本文通过研究偏远的昆士兰原住民（澳大利亚）的福利与犯罪联系来解决这些差距。我们使用犯罪报告数据和间断时间序列设计来探索 2020-20 年动态社会福利政策的影响21 日：为应对 COVID-19 引发的经济衰退，该时期暂时从严格的新自由主义福利模式（即严格的条件、低福利率）转向更具支持性和非商品化的社会福利。我们的研究结果与先前的研究一致，这些研究表明更多的支持性和非商品化政策与较低的犯罪率相关。我们还通过阐明种族政治如何激发社会可以产生或减少的政策犯罪菌株，因此，以土著“他者”的形象在社会上构建犯罪。