Crime is a distinctly European concept that was institutionalized into the criminal justice system through the penal code, created in the 1700s by founding theorists of criminology’s classical school of thought. In practice, crime is a concept that limits what can be defined as harmful and violent. Written at the height of Europe’s genocidal colonial wars and chattel slavery, the penal code excluded, and continues to exclude mass atrocities and violations committed through these institutions. Since criminal justice institutions were birthed through and spread by Western Europe’s colonial wars around the globe, the study of colonialism, crime, and social control requires a re-evaluation of the pillars of Western European thought and the peculiar colonizing economies and punitive praxis that produced the criminal justice system. Through an anticolonial, genealogical framework scholars and researchers can better locate criminal justice institutions, practices, and concepts within their colonial contexts, allowing for a more thorough understanding of how history, power, politics, and economy shape crime and practice social control in the 21st century.
At the core of an anticolonial study of crime and social control is an understanding that Europe’s crime-concept depends upon institutionalized constructions of dangerousness for colonized people and nations, and lack thereof, for colonizing people and nations. Dangerousness, as defined by colonial renditions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation, and so forth, anchors the cultural and implemented processes of criminalization; as a result, proper and comprehensive deconstructions of colonizing definitions of dangerousness require an intersectional understanding of power and oppression. Therefore, an effective framework for the study of colonialism, crime, and social control necessitates a re-evaluation and re-articulation of the following questions: what is colonialism?; what is crime?; what is colonial social control?; and what is criminology’s relationship to colonialism?
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Colonialism, Crime, and Social Control
Viviane Saleh-Hanna
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Critical Criminologies
Walter S. DeKeseredy
There is no single critical criminology. Rather, there are critical criminologies with different histories, methods, theories, and political perspectives. However, critical criminology is often defined as a perspective that views the major sources of crime as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society. Critical criminologists oppose prisons and other draconian means of social control. Their main goal is major radical and cultural change, but they recognize that these transitions will not occur in the current neoliberal era. Hence, most critical criminologists propose short-term anticrime policies and practices and fundamental social, economic, and political transformations, such as a change from a capitalist economy to one based on more socialist principles.
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Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
Brooke B. Chambers and Joachim J. Savelsberg
Genocide and ethnic cleansing are among the most deadly human-made catastrophes. Together with other forms of government violence, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, the death toll they caused during the 20th century alone approximates 200 million. This is an estimated ten times higher than the number of deaths resulting from all violence committed in civil society during the same period. Yet the definition of genocide, its perception as a social problem, and the designation of responsible actors as criminals are all relatively recent. Globalization, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and cultural shifts are interrelated contributors to this process of redefinition.
While genocide and ethnic cleansing often appear to be unpredictable and chaotic, they nonetheless underlie a socio-logic across time and space. As the field of study evolved, scholars debated the role of authority and ideology in enabling violence. Today, consensus has shifted away from deterministic explanations about intrinsic hatred engrained in particular groups to sociological factors. They include the role of political regimes, war, organization, and narratives of ethnic hatred, each of which can play a role in facilitating violence.
Recent developments also include the creation of new institutional mechanisms that seek to punish perpetrators and prevent the occurrence of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Among them are criminal justice responses that work potentially through deterrence, but also—more fundamentally—through the initiation of cultural change. Prosecutions, as well as supplemental mechanisms such as truth commissions, may indeed lead to a radical shift in the perception of mass violence and those responsible for it, thereby delegitimizing genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns.
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Global Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of Children
Julie Anne Laser-Maira, Charles E. Hounmenou, and Donna Peach
The term commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) refers to the for-profit sexual exploitation of children and youth through buying, trading, or selling sexual acts. CSEC is a subset of children and youth who are victims of human trafficking or trafficking in persons (TIP). The Stockholm Declaration defines CSEC as a form of coercion and violence against children that amounts to forced labor and a contemporary form of slavery; there are many forms of CSEC, including child prostitution, child marriage, early marriage, forced marriage, temporary marriage, mail-order brides, child labor, child servitude, domestic servitude, begging, massage, sex tourism, child pornography, online streaming of sexual abuse, sexual extortion of children, and sexual solicitation of children. Not all experiences of sexual servitude are globally recognized. It is critical to explore the concepts of race, inequality, power, culture, and globalization and how they impact the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
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Hyperincarceration and Indigeneity
Thalia Anthony and Harry Blagg
Indigenous people have been subject to policies that disproportionately incarcerate them since the genesis of colonization of their lands. Incarceration is one node of a field of colonial oppression for Indigenous people. Colonial practices have sought to reduce Indigenous people to “bare life,” to use Agamben’s term, where their humanity is denied the basic rights and expression in the pursuit of sovereign extinguishment. Across the settler colonies of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, the colonial drive to conquer land and eliminate Indigenous peoples has left deep scars on Indigenous communities and compromised bonds to kin, culture, and country. Indigenous people have been made refugees in their own countries.
Contemporary manifestations of penal incarceration for Indigenous people are a continuation of colonial strategies rather than a distinct phase. The concept of “hyperincarceration” draws attention to the problem of incarceration and its discriminatory targets. It also turns our attention to the turnstile of incarceration in Western postmodernity. However, the prison is but one form of exclusion for Indigenous people in a constellation of eliminatory and assimilatory practices, policies, and regimes imposed by colonial governance. Rather than overemphasizing the prison, there needs to be a broader conceptualization of colonial governance through “the camp,” again in the words of Agamben. The colonial institutionalization of Indigenous people, including in out-of-home care, psychiatric care, and corrective programs, is akin to a camp where Indigenous people are relegated to the margins of society. We eschew a narrow notion of hyperincarceration and instead posit a structural analysis of colonial relations underpinning the camp.
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Indigenous Courts
Valmaine Toki
In many jurisdictions, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States and across the Pacific, offending rates for Indigenous peoples continue to be disproportionate to population size. For example, in New Zealand, Māori comprise over half the male prison population yet constitute only 15% of the national population. In Canada and the United States, where Indigenous people constitute 3.6 and 1.7% of the population, respectively, imprisonment rates are also disproportionate.
Notwithstanding attempts to address these statistics, the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in prisons continues. However, Te Kooti Rangatahi, a marae-based (traditional-setting) “Indigenous court” for youths, has demonstrated some initial success as a unique initiative. This “court” integrates tikanga Māori (Māori culture) into the judicial process, with the aim of facilitating the reconnection of young people with their culture and involving the wider community. Te Kooti Matariki, an Indigenous court for adults, employs tikanga but within a mainstream court. A comparative perspective with the Navajo Common Law and Navajo Nation Tribal Court system demonstrates that the inclusion of Indigenous concepts into Western legal systems is not novel and should not in and of itself prevent the extension of Te Kooti Rangatahi and Te Kooti Matariki’s jurisdictions.
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Indigenous Justice in Oceania and North America
Beverley Jacobs
Indigenous justice has been practiced by Indigenous peoples in Oceania and North America since time immemorial. These practices have been disregarded, disrespected, and displaced by Eurocentric principles of criminal law and procedure—a system that has been forced upon Indigenous peoples without their consent. As a result of colonization, Indigenous peoples have endured a system that not only has used its laws to erase the existence of Indigenous peoples but also has failed to recognize and honor Indigenous peoples’ systems and principles of laws.
At the present time, the colonial systems of laws have begun to recognize Indigenous laws and justice; however, the state has still tried to control how, what, and where Indigenous laws and justice can be utilized. There continues to be a lack of understanding of Indigenous justice, because most education systems are not required to teach it. This is slowly starting to change, but we are nowhere near the actual recognition and practice of Indigenous justice systems. Indigenous peoples continue to practice their laws despite the colonial systems and processes, and in the future, Indigenous justice will be fully recognized with its own jurisdiction and with Indigenous peoples making healthy and respectful decisions about their own peoples.
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Indigenous Peoples and Criminology
Juan Marcellus Tauri
Indigenous criminology has developed since the start of the 21st century as a result of the regeneration of Indigenous epistemologies and reinvigoration of Indigenous critique of the criminal justice practices of settler-colonial states. In stark contrast to Carlen’s call for criminology as a scientific art, Indigenous formulations—political, partisan, and subjective, reflective of the stated aims of activist scholars such as Agozino, Monture-Angus, Victor, Tauri, and Porter—are evangelical by necessity to hold the settler-colonial state accountable for the violence it perpetrates against Indigenous peoples, and to subject western criminologists to critical scrutiny for their historical and contemporary support for the state. This support manifests through the use of theories and research methodologies that silence Indigenous experiences of settler-colonial crime control, and approaches to crime and social harm, and through the discipline of criminology’s continued support for the state’s continued subjugation of Indigenes. The Indigenous critique challenges the Eurocentric nature of much western criminological analysis of Indigenous over-representation in criminal justice, especially in settler-colonial settings, which often lacks a theory of colonialism, reserving analysis for the recalcitrant native and their supposedly criminogenic culture. Also problematic is the tendency of many criminologists to utilise non-engaging methods for researching Indigenous peoples, a process that too often sidelines their experiences of crime control processes. In contrast, Indigenous scholars and their non-Indigenous allies propose an Indigenous variant of the discipline based on core principles that distinguish their activist scholarship from the mainstream, including rejecting the false dichotomy between objectivity and commitment, giving back by speaking truth to power, and making research real for Indigenous peoples.
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International Cultural Criminology
Eleni Dimou
Cultural criminology places crime and its control within the realm of culture. Namely, it sees crime and crime control as social constructs or as cultural products; that is, their meaning is defined by the existing power relations of the social and cultural context of which they are part. As such, cultural criminology focuses on understanding how the meanings of crime, justice, and crime control are constructed, enforced, contested, and resisted within an increasingly globalized socioeconomic and cultural context. This is the context of late modernity where capitalism continues to infiltrate one community after the other, transforming people into consumers and experiences; emotions, life, and nature into consumer products. It is a context of transnational networks of flows of people, capital, goods, and images, where identities, communities, politics, and culture are increasingly constructed through the media and the Internet. There is a growing enmeshment of human communities—signified by the term globalization—in a way that events in one part of the world increasingly affect the other, and which make all the more evident perpetuating inequalities between Global North and South, as well as increasing marginality, exploitation, and exclusion of minorities within Global North and South. Simultaneously it is a world with effervescent potential for creativity, political activism, resistance, transcendence, and recuperation. This is briefly the context of late modernity within which cultural criminology endeavors to understand how perceptions about crime, justice, and crime control come to be constructed, enforced, and contested.
Cultural criminology adopts a triadic framework of analysis whereby it bridges the macro level of power (i.e., capitalism, patriarchy, racism, anthropocentrism, imperialism) to that of the meso level of culture (i.e., art forms, media, subcultures, knowledge, discourse) and the micro level of everyday life and emotions. Through this intertwined exploration of the macro, the meso, and the micro in the globally connected world of late modernity, cultural criminology embraces a highly interdisciplinary and critical stance that grants it a particular international edge, as it is attuned to contemporary issues that affect communities locally and internationally. Cultural criminology’s international edge, for example, is depicted in challenging globally established forms of criminological knowledge production, which are dictated by state definitions of crime and “law and order”-oriented policies. These definitions and their accompanying policies omit harms committed by the powerful or the state itself along with everyday life experiences of and with crime. The call for a cultural criminology is one of resistance to these dominant forms of knowledge that reinforce and legitimize the status quo at local, national, and international levels. It is a call that aims to reorient criminology to contemporary and perpetuating manifestations of power, inequalities, and resistance within the contemporary context of late modernity and globalization. To do so though, cultural criminology should also be more reflexive on its positionality within the realm of knowledge, as it represents largely a Global North perspective. As such, it should extend its attentiveness to forms of knowledge and perspectives stemming from the Global South and should seek to be critiqued from and open a dialogue with Southern and non-Western decolonial perspectives.
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LGBT People in Prison: Management Strategies, Human Rights Violations, and Political Mobilization
Jason A. Brown and Valerie Jenness
In the 21st century, an unprecedented rise in the visibility of and social acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people has been accompanied by exponential growth in scholarship on LGBT people generally and their experiences in diverse communities and institutional contexts in the United States and around the globe. A growing body of literature draws on first-person accounts, qualitative analyses, and statistical assessments to understand how and why LGBT people end up in prisons and other types of lock-up facilities, as well as how they experience being imprisoned and the collateral consequences of those experiences.
Scholarship in this body of work focuses on (a) the range of abuses inflicted on LGBT prisoners by other prisoners and state officials alike, including mistreatment now widely recognized as human rights violations; (b) the variety of ways LGBT people are managed by prison officials, in the first instance whether their housing arrangements in prison are integrationist, segregationist, and/or some combination of both, including the temporary and permanent isolation of LGBT prisoners; and (c) the range of types of political mobilization that expose the status quo as unacceptable, define, and document the treatment of LGBT people behind bars as human rights violations, demand change, and advocate new policies and practices related to the carceral state’s treatment of LGBT people in the United States and across the globe.
The study of LGBT people in prisons and other detention facilities is compatible with larger calls for the inclusion of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression in criminology and criminal justice research by advancing theoretical and empirical understandings of LGBT populations as they interact with the criminal justice system, and by incorporating this knowledge into broader criminological conversations.
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Proactive Policing and Terrorism
Badi Hasisi, Simon Perry, and Michael Wolfowicz
Over the last few decades, one of the most pressing issues for governments, societies, and the law enforcement agencies that serve and protect them has been the threat of terrorism. Given that these changes represent a relatively new area for police, it is important to understand how terrorism is best policed and what approaches, strategies, and tactics are most effective. While the evidence base is still in its developmental stages, the evidence that does exist suggests that proactive policing strategies already employed against other forms of crime are the most useful and effective for policing terrorism. Policing efforts that focus on high concentrations of crimes at places (“hotspots”), or among the high-risk offenders, and employ problem-solving perspectives and use community-based strategies show consistent evidence of effectiveness and improving relations between the police and the public. Based on this evidence, policing agencies that undertake proven, proactive strategies toward policing terrorism are better able to incorporate their new role and focus within their broader law enforcement functions. By doing so, policing agencies can expand their role and function in a way that draws on their experience and strengths, rather than “reinventing the wheel” and overstretching resources. Additionally, policing agencies from different countries can draw on their own experience and local knowledge in dealing with other forms of crime, as well as the experience of other agencies and countries, in order to develop a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to policing terrorism.
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The Quantitative Study of Terrorist Events: Challenges and Opportunities
Jonathan Grossman and Ami Pedahzur
Since 2001, unprecedented resources have been invested in research into global terrorism, resulting in a dramatic rise in the number of academic publications on the topic. Works by scholars from predominantly quantitative disciplines predominate in this literature, and the unfolding development of data science and big data research has accentuated the trend. Many researchers in global terrorism created event databases, in which every row represents a distinct terrorist attack and every column a variable (e.g., the date and location of the attack, the number of casualties, etc.). Such event data are usually extracted from news sources and undergo a process of coding—the translation of unstructured text into numerical or categorical values. Some researchers collect and code their data manually; others use an automated script, or combine the efforts of humans and software. Other researchers who use event data do not collect and process their data at all; rather, they analyze other scholars’ databases. Academics and practitioners have relied on such databases for the cross-regional study of terrorism, analyzing their data statistically in an attempt to identify trends, build theories, predict future incidents, and formulate policies.
Unfortunately, event data on terrorism often suffer from substantial issues of accuracy and reproducibility. A comparison between the data on suicide terrorism in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in two of the most prominent databases in the field and an independent database of confirmed events reveals the magnitude of these problems. Among the most common pitfalls for event data are replication problems (the sources that the databases cite, if there are any at all, cannot be retrieved), selection bias (events that should have been included in the database are not in it), description bias (the details of events in the database are incorrect), and coding problems (for example, duplicate events). Some of these problems originate in the press sources that are used to create the databases, usually English-language newspaper articles, and others are attributable to deficient data-gathering and/or coding practices on the part of database creators and coders. In many cases, these researchers do not understand the local contexts, languages, histories, and cultures of the regions they study. Further, many coders are not trained in qualitative methods and are thus incapable of critically reading and accurately coding their unstructured sources. Overcoming these challenges will require a change of attitude: truly accurate and impactful cross-regional data on terrorism can only be achieved through collaboration across projects, disciplines, and fields of expertise. The creators of event databases are encouraged to adopt the high standards of transparency, replicability, data-sharing, and version control that are prevalent in the STEM sciences and among software developers. More than anything, they need to acknowledge that without good and rigorous qualitative work during the stage of data collection, there can be no good quantitative work during the stage of data analysis.
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Race, Ethnicity, and the War on Terror
Kelly Welch
The unofficial War on Terror that began in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States expanded a wide range of formal social controls as well as more informal methods of punitive control that were disproportionately directed toward Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and those who were perceived to be. Although terrorism had been racialized long before 9/11, this event galvanized American support for sweeping new policies and practices that specifically targeted racial and ethnic minorities, particularly those who were immigrants. New agencies and prisons were created, individual rights and civil liberties were restricted, and acts of hate and discrimination against those who were racially, ethnically, and religiously stereotyped as potential terrorists increased. Although research shows that most domestic terrorism is not perpetrated by Muslims, Arabs, or those originating from the Middle East, the racialized stereotype of terrorists had a major impact on how the War on Terror was executed and how its implementation affected members of certain minority groups in the United States.
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Selling Sex in a Global Context
Aimee Wodda and Meghna Bhat
Commercial sex continues to be an object of debate in the realm of criminological and criminal justice. The regulation of commercial sex in a global context varies due to local law, culture, and custom. Global criminolegal responses to selling sex include criminalization, decriminalization, abolition, neo-abolition, and legalization. In recent decades, global public policymakers have become increasingly concerned with the public health aspects associated with negative outcomes related to the criminalization of the purchase, facilitation, and/or sale of sex. These concerns include violence against those who sell sex, stigma when attempting to access healthcare and social services, increased risk of sexually transmitted infections or diseases (STIs or STDs) including HIV/AIDS, and economic vulnerability that leaves many who sell sex unable to negotiate the use of condoms and at risk of police arrest for carrying condoms. Those most at risk of harm tend to be young people, LGBTQ populations, and people who are racial or ethnic minorities within their communities—these are often intersecting identities. Organizations such as Amnesty International, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, Human Rights Watch, UN AIDS, and the World Health Organization recommend decriminalization of commercial sex in order to reduce stigma and increase positive health outcomes. Scholars have also examined the challenges faced by migrant sex workers and the problematic effects of being labeled a victim of trafficking. Contemporary strategies geared toward reducing harm for those who sell sex tend to focus on rights issues and how they affect the well-being of those who sell sex.
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Youth Violence in Latin America
Arturo Alvarado Mendoza and Gabriel Tenenbaum Ewig
An issue of great importance in Latin America is what it means to become a youth, and more specifically, a juvenile victim or perpetrator of violence in relation to the territory and overall context of criminality in this region. Considering the historic singularities, an investigation of what it means to be/become must include what it means to be and become a young Indigenous, Black, mixed-race, or white youth and either poor, middle class, or wealthy. Admittedly, it is practically impossible to capture every existing difference in the juvenile condition in the region.
The study of these issues in Latin America must be approached by considering its history of colonialism, which subjugated its various cultures. One must also consider the long-term consequences of the military dictatorships that hounded the region for decades. Youth have also been affected by the global integration processes and the era of neoliberal policies. When studying juvenile deviant behavior and crime, we must consider the deep and cyclical economic crises that have scourged the region—the inherited disadvantages, the structural inequalities, and the lack of fundamental rights that impact what it means to be/become a youth in this region.
Self-inflicted, interpersonal, collective, and political violent behaviors affect Latin American youths. A salient form of aggression comes from lethal armed violence as well as other crimes that have specific regional traits. In most cases, the deviant behavior is a result of interpersonal conflicts. However, in other situations, collective violence is caused either by precarious urban settlements plagued by violence or by the presence of criminal organizations that affect their everyday life.
Widespread gender violence is also a problem in the region. Young women and girls are subject to systematic victimization: sexual, racial, occupational, and political. Latin America faces a profound crisis of gender violence, with a constant increase in its most fatal form: femicides.
In this context, national authorities have developed public policies but, for the most part, they still are ineffective in mitigating the problems.
One of the most important difficulties faced when reforming juvenile justice systems in the region is recognizing adolescents as entitled to human rights and terminating the old inquisitorial or tutelage model. We must take into account that in this region, there is a cyclical demand for more punitive measures and hard-line policies against juvenile offenders.
