Edition 65

Crimes and Punishments

  • Published 6th August, 2019
  • ISBN: 9781925773798
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

What is it about crime stories that make people hunger for them? The volume of content produced in these genres – from the pages of mysteries and thrillers to audio and visual dramas and reconstructions – hints at a primal and deeply ingrained fascination with the darker side of human nature. While crime fiction has long held appeal for the reading public, the ways that crimes play out in the real world are often more complex, compelling and shocking than the most complicated imagined plots.

Griffith Review 65: Crimes and Punishments tells stories of reform and possibility from inside our institutions, from the greatest to the smallest of their participants. It tells stories of state-sanctioned violence, of justice after decades of systematic failures and betrayals, of truths, lies and assumptions, and of the ones that get away.

Edited by Ashley Hay, this edition features writers including Matthew Condon, Gideon Haigh, Kristina Olsson, Behrouz Boochani & Omid Tofighian, Amy McQuire, Ross Homel, Sally Piper, Bill Wilkie and Paul Mazerolle.

In this Edition


White justice, black suffering

Dad began this job in 1989 in the days of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. He was not the only black prison guard on staff – in fact, at one point, Rockhampton’s jail had the highest percentage of Indigenous employees in the state. And yet, there were even more Murris locked up. The first thing that shocked Dad was just how many were inside, and over the next two decades he would see many of his own relatives coming through the gates.

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