Authoritarian Criminology and Racist Statecraft: Rationalizations for Racial Profiling, Carding and Legibilizing the Herd

This essay is a discrete survey of administrative-authoritarian criminologists’ neutralizing techniques for justifying and aiding and abetting racial profiling in policing and, by inference, racialized ‘carding’. Principally focused on Canada and the US, material for this survey arises from the effort of administrative-authoritarian criminologists who claim to refute commissioned reports, case law and obiter dicta, government reports and scholarly research affirming racial profiling in particular and racial discrimination in the criminal legal system generally. Rooted in counter-colonial, anti-criminology and abolitionist epistemology my method of exposition is to turn the claims administrative-authoritarian criminologists hold to be true back onto criminology itself to see what account it provides for itself. Following the path worn by Hannah Arendt, I set out to demonstrate that in taking the effects of racial profiling and the legibilizing of ‘carding’ as objectively authoritarian-criminologists, administrative-authoritarian are irresponsible in the exercise of judgment to true ideas.

“Writing the Other as Other”: Exploring the Othered Lens in Academia Using Collaborative Autoethnography

Trends seemingly signal the decay of White heterosexual male hegemony in academe. Still, while changes have addressed lack of access to an academic system whose benefits are assumed, critical literatures call into question Western-based theory and traditionally Eurocentric ways of knowledge production. An important programmatic component of decolonizing knowledge production consists of arguing for increased inclusivity and diversity among scholars. The present study is inscribed in these decolonial tendencies and focuses on the experience of otherness inside academia. Using collaborative autoethnography, we set side-by-side the academic and professional experiences and epistemological reflections of two criminal justice and criminology scholars: an Arab European scholar of politico-ideological violence and a Black American scholar of identity and the psychology of justice. We explore otherness as a ‘social fact’ and identify three dimensions, namely (1) otherness as a lens to read coloniality, (2) feeling and coping with otherness, and (3) otherness as connection. We suggest that promoting the “othered lens” in academia, especially criminology, may not only be healthy and necessary for a diversification of views and perspectives, but also epistemologically and methodologically vital for how criminology engages with the socially deviant or harmed Other it is, by its very essence, preoccupied with.

British Criminological Amnesia: Making the Case for a Black and Postcolonial Feminist Criminology

The discipline of Western criminology emerged during the colonial era as a means of controlling the ‘other’. Despite its failures in terms of recidivism these perspectives have been adopted on a global scale. Crime and punishment have been heavily influenced by these ideas and continue to reproduce them in relation to problematic, and pathologising, discourses such as the UK gang agenda which positions young black men as naturally aggressive, sexual predators and innately criminal. How criminologists carry out research also demands attention through a decolonial lens. A move towards a British postcolonial criminology has received scant attention despite there being a range of global literature which calls for changes to be made to the roots of the discipline. Similarly, feminist criminology in Britain has barely been touched by ideas of black and postcolonial feminisms. Consequently, drawing on what has written to further the cause of a black feminist criminology (BFC), this paper argues for the adoption of a black and postcolonial feminist criminology (BPFC) in the UK whereby issues of race, intersectionality and decolonial baggage are central to how we understand crime.

Toward Sovereign Indigenous Justice: On Removing the Colonial Straightjacket

Canada has oppressed Indigenous peoples capacity for true sovereignty through colonialism, genocide and attempted assimilation. This devastation manifests in the disproportionate social ills facing Indigenous peoples and their overrepresentation at all levels of the imposed criminal justice system (CJS). Trauma and internalized colonialism have constrained the capacity of Indigenous Nations to reclaim their place in the world as self-governing peoples. Canada has attempted to ‘fix’ this problem through creating parallel systems, trying to fit ‘Indigenous’ conceptions of justice into existing systems, and problematically adopting restorative justice as synonymous with Indigenous justice. The rhetoric of reconciliation and apology mask the continual genocidal, assimilative goals of the state. With these caveats in mind, the need to reject internalized colonialism and develop capacity for the development of sovereign Indigenous justice systems will be examined.

Achieving Wellbeing and Prosocial Transformation Through Social Mobilisation: An Evaluation of a Gang Empowerment Strategy

Adult gangs hold a criminalised and deviantised position in Aoteaora/New Zealand. Further, a host of strategies have been enacted to remove or obliterate the ‘gang problem’. These strategies’ lack of efficacy can be attributed to the imposition deficit-based criminogenic constructions on populations that are misunderstood and continually othered. The current study documents an evaluation of a gang-driven social mobilisation initiative. Identified outcomes are linked to the rejection of deficit and criminogenic epistemology in favour of a holistic appreciation of the socio-historical self. Criminogenic strategies have been found to entrench gang membership. In contrast, a holistic appreciation provides a foundation for social mobilisation where the membership is best placed to respond to their own needs.

Silencing Prisoner Protests: Criminology, Black Women and State-sanctioned Violence

Protests and resistance from those locked away in jails, prisons and detention centers occur but receive limited, if any, mainstream attention. In the United States and Canada, 61 instances of prisoner unrest occurred in 2018 alone. In August of the same year, incarcerated men and women in the United States planned nineteen days of peaceful protest to improve prison conditions. Complex links of institutionalized power, white supremacy and Black resistance is receiving renewed attention; however, state-condoned violence against women in correctional institutions (e.g., physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and medical neglect by prison staff) is understudied. This qualitative case study examines 10 top-tier Criminology journals from 2008-2018 for the presence of prisoner unrest/protest. Findings reveal a paucity of attention devoted to prisoner unrest or state-sanctioned violence. This paper argues that the invisibility of prisoner unrest conceals the breadth and depth of state-inflicted violence against prisoners, especially marginalized peoples. This paper concludes with a discussion of the historical legacy and contemporary invisibility of Black women’s resistance against state-inflicted violence. This paper argues that in order to make sense of and tackle state-condoned violence we must turn to incarcerated individuals, activists, and Black and Indigenous thinkers and grassroots actors.

Humanifesto of the Decolonization of Criminology and Justice

I bear witness as a survivor of genocide orchestrated by imperialism and carried out by neocolonial stooges who proclaimed that ‘all is fair in warfare’ and that ‘starvation is a legitimate weapon of war’ even when Igbo women and innocent men made up the bulk of the 3.1 million people killed in Biafra in 30 months. I acknowledge the knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of this land and of every land that were colonized, chattelized, racialized, victimized, pulverized, dehumanized, genocidized, proletarianized, lumpenized, marginalized, and homogenized with the tools of criminology, among other tools, for the benefits of white-supremacist imperialist patriarchy. I testify that we are survivors who were never expected to survive to meet one another and raise our voices to say, Happy Survival! To say that we are survivors is not to suggest that we have completely restored our independence but to state that for as long as the forces of imperialism are entrenched, we are determined to resist. We will keep speaking truth to unjust power the way that our ancestors defiantly stuck out their tongues and flipped their middle fingers to force the conquerors to sign treaties recognizing our autonomy as human beings equal in beauty, wisdom, culture, courage and originality. This article outlines the decolonization paradigm in criminology, the rationale for this paradigmatic shift, the major contributions to this paradigm, and a projection of the future agenda of the paradigm.