Abstract
Criminal justice abolitionism has a long history, with calls to abolish or radically modify corrections and policing a feature of criminological debates in liberal democracies. The Me-Too movement, Black Lives Matter and the COVID pandemic gave further impetus to reform agendas anchored in left- and right-wing dissatisfaction with over-policing and under-policing. Calls to abolish the police morphed into calls to abolish criminology (see Saleh-Hanna et al. 2023), a discipline which had often collaborated closely with police and had been active in articulating what the editors of this book call ‘the criminal question’.
Questioning the criminal question has been a feature of critical criminology, which has been galvanised in the last two decades by work which has examined the relationship between imperialism and colonialism and the criminal justice system and criminological knowledge (see Aas 2012; Agozino 2003; Blagg and Anthony 2019; Brown 2014; Carrington et al. 2018; Cuneen 2011; Godfrey and Dunstall 2005; Hogg and Brown 2018; Medina 2011). In my own country, Australia, Indigenous Australian scholars have highlighted the role of criminology in colonial and neo-colonial processes (Porter 2018). There is also a degree to which we might question the status of criminology as a discipline, being more a topic or question, as put here, structured around diverse disciplinary approaches. In Australia and elsewhere it has emerged from disciplines such as law, sociology, and psychology, all of which claim an older pedigree.
Have criminologists done enough to address the disgraceful state of Indigenous justice in Australia and elsewhere globally? If we take the statistics at face value, regularly highlighted by criminologists, it would seem not (see Cunneen 2018). But, in its defence, criminology in Australia and throughout much of the world is an emergent enterprise. As the editors of this book note, ‘positivist’ criminology has been around since the late nineteenth century and it certainly ‘prioritized and naturalized a style of intellectual production in the Global North, which postulated the universality of its problems, methods, concepts, and arguments, hiding their particularity and specificity’. Although elements of this criminology remain evident with empiricism and realist approaches, it has also been thoroughly challenged and much derided by wave after wave of critical challenges to its orthodoxies that emerged during the 1970s and persisted into the present. This book articulates the latest challenges to both democratise criminological knowledge production and highlight how the criminal question has been vital to colonial processes.
There is not much here regarding the measurement of crime, the scholarship drawing more on qualitative approaches, including history. The strength of critical traditions in criminology is evident in the ability to pose tough questions about the role criminology has had in colonisation. If nothing else, it has shown itself to be highly reflexive in a way that other related disciplines, such as law, have not. For example, in the current volume, Cunneen and Moore offer grim accounts of criminology's history arguing that a core site for the operation of colonial power is the law and criminal legal systems of the coloniser, which have remained within both settler societies and former colonies post empire.
This book captures the paradigmatic shift in criminology which has variously been labelled decolonial, indigenous, and southern. The authors of the current volume are well placed to engage this shift, being a mix of established and emerging scholars. The collection started life as a seminar series during the pandemic and production of the book was delayed by the pandemic. The delays have produced a book worth waiting for. Often collections that emerge from conferences, workshops or seminar series tend to present chapters that read as literature reviews, charting trodden territory, yet making few discoveries or new insights. Most of the chapters in this volume work to offer both methodological and theoretical strategies through which decolonisation might be made possible. These are encased with an introduction and conclusion by the editors which are thoughtful and well-researched and go beyond description and cliché to integrate the subject matter into a political project. Particularly refreshing is the way in which they have resisted a tendency in the decolonial field to get bogged down in polemics or esotericism. Strategies here also go beyond ‘remembrance and restoration’ or merely ‘discovering’ a history of ideas and practitioners from the global south whose contributions have been marginalised or ignored in the northern metropolises.
The global reach of the scholarship in this collection is also impressive with contributions from emerging and established scholars from diverse regions. To assemble such a group of critical scholars is no easy task, especially when considering the emergent character of criminology in the global south. Critical voices from the global south are also rare given that they will likely run counter to the state and its penal politics. In vast underprivileged regions of the world, academics and researchers have a pervasive experience of low wages, lack of funds for the development of empirical research, difficulties in accessing intellectual production that is published in commercial media (books, academic journals, etc.), lack of access to data, and state actors and institutions related to social control, lack of specialized postgraduate programmes, and limited career paths. (Aliverti et al. 2023: 348)
They add: The politics of knowledge production should not be relegated to a footnote, but rather play a central part in our understanding of the criminal question as itself a site of reproduction and contestation of power forces and relations. It also demands acknowledgement of our active engagement in the inequalities that produce this field and that this field produces. It requires a political and ethical commitment to change these conditions through sustained efforts to include silenced voices and advocate for academic models of funding and collaborations that lead to more democratic production and communication of criminological knowledge. (Aliverti et al. 2023: 358)
The writers of these chapters tend to avoid two problems when working in this field. There is reductionism, whereby everything is reduced to a colonial legacy. There is similarly a tendency to claim only what is deemed ‘bad’ as colonial legacy. The risk here, of course, is that colonisation becomes the new ‘neo-liberalism’, whereby anything that does not belong in a progressive view of the world is derided and colonisation risks becoming a throwaway label for progressive deficit. Secondly, the writing here mostly avoids ‘patronizing narratives that devoid colonized actors of power’ (O’Reilly, 2023). The challenge here is reminiscent of earlier Marxist legacies where there was sometimes a pull to idealise histories prior to capitalism. As noted here, critical voices need to explain why traditional state-based forms of justice remain appealing to marginalised groups.
Nonetheless, a dominant theme in this book is to see coloniality as a living force shaping contemporary power relations, structural inequalities, and lived experiences in post-colonial and former colonial sites. As a whole, this collection manages to introduce theoretical and methodological frameworks that seek to ameliorate such inequalities without orientalising or romanticising crime. The book shows us that different forms of colonialism exist and have emerged from the ‘primitive colonialism’ of the period of European empires, avoiding the influence of totalising or universalistic perspectives evident in so much non-critical and critical criminology.
