Abstract
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Mark Brown has won the 2017 Theoretical Criminology best article prize for his article ‘Postcolonial Penality: Liberty and Repression in the Shadow of Independence, India c. 1947’. Reviewers commended the piece as one of the best theoretical pieces on penal power and colonial rule. The article addresses a ‘criminological blind spot’ missed in criminology’s ‘fetishization of the domestic now’. This ‘blind spot’ is postcolonial penality. Brown questions the assumption that the end of colonialism and the start of independence necessarily entailed an easing of penality. Instead, his article investigates the continuities between colonial and postcolonial penality with specific regard to one of the most notorious penal measures in colonial India, the sanctioning of ‘criminal tribes’ and the punishing of habitual offenders. Brown finds more continuities than disruptions and thus argues that independence did not bring about the ‘rupture in penal practices’ that many might have expected. Instead, he finds that ‘what became possible and was thought desirable when the open horizon of postcolonial statehood lay before the new India’s governing classes’ was more continuous with the colonial punishment than one might have thought. We congratulate Mark Brown on this award.
We look forward to another exciting year at Theoretical Criminology. Our May issue will be a Special Issue on “Twenty Years of Green Criminology,” which will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of TC’s first special issue on green criminology, published in our 2nd Volume in 1998. This new special issue will be both retrospective and prospective, providing a critical survey and discussion of theoretical questions and directions in green criminology, and bringing together some of the ‘original’ voices from 1998 with some of ‘newer’ ones.