Decolonising Criminology

This book undertakes an exploratory exercise in decolonizing criminology through engaging postcolonial and postdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies. Through its historical and political analysis and place-based case studies, it challenges criminological inquiry by installing colonial structures of power at the centre of the contemporary criminological debate. This work unseats the Western nation-state as the singular point of departure for comparative criminological and socio-legal research. Decolonising Criminology argues that postcolonial and postdisciplinary critique can open up new pathways for criminological investigation. It builds on recent debates in criminology from outside of the Anglosphere. The authors deploy a number of heuristic devices, perspectives and theories generally ignored by criminologists of the Global North and engage perspectives concerned with articulating new decolonised epistemologies of the Global South. This book disputes the view that colonisation is a thing of the past and provides lessons for the Global North.

Decolonizing Data yields valuable insights into the decolonization of research methods by addressing and examining health inequalities from an anti-racist and anti-oppressive standpoint.

Within the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between criminal law, punishment, and imperialism, or the contours and exercise of penal power in the Global South. Decolonizing the Criminal Question is the first work of its kind to comprehensively place colonialism and its legacies at the heart of criminological enquiry. By examining the reverberations of colonial history and logics in the operation of penal power, this volume explores the uneasy relationship between criminal justice and colonialism, bringing relevance of these legacies in criminological enquiries to the forefront of the discussion. It invites and pursues a better understanding of the links between imperialism and colonialism on the one hand, and nationalism and globalisation on the other, by exposing the imprints of these links on processes of marginalisation, racialisation, and exclusion that are central to contemporary criminal justice practices. Covering a range of jurisdictions and themes, Decolonizing the Criminal Question details how colonial and imperial domination relied on the internalization of hierarchies and identities -- for example, racial, geographical, and geopolitical -- of both the colonized and the colonizer, and shaped their subjectivity through imageries, discourses, and technologies. Offering innovative, conceptual, and methodological approaches to the study of the criminal question, this work is an essential read for scholars not only focused on criminology and criminal justice, but also for scholars in law, anthropology, sociology, politics, history, and a range of other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Decolonizing the Criminal Question is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Exploring Criminal Justice: The Essentials provides an extensive overview of the American criminal justice system in a concise and accessible format. This engaging text examines the people and processes that make up the system and how they interact. It also covers the historic context and modern features of the criminal justice system and encourages students to think about how current events in crime affect their everyday lives. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition.

This book explores strategies, approaches, tools, challenges, and reflections that animate the conversation around decolonisation in UK law schools. It investigates how we can have, within the UK law school, difficult conversations about the ways in which history has influenced what the law is, how law is taught, what law is taught, who the law works for, and who the law does not work for. The conversation about decolonisation of the university and curricula continues to raise questions for knowledge production and transmission in educational institutions. Decolonisation also raises questions about the impact of the preceding issues on people within and outside these educational institutions. The decolonisation debate is an opportunity for legal academics to reflect on the origins of their own individual academic practices in research as well as the content of their curriculum. This volume examines the preceding issues as they relate to academic practices and legal pedagogy in UK law schools. The authors examine how legal scholars can achieve aims of decolonisation within the practical aims of teaching of law, as well as the limitations and possible challenges of these endeavours. This volume will be of interest to legal scholars, legal educators, law students as well as legal practitioners who are engaged in questions of how decolonisation relates to law – broadly understood. It was originally published as a special issue of The Law Teacher.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to explore indigenous peoples' contact with criminal justice systems comprehensively in a contemporary and historical context. Drawing on comparative indigenous material from North America, Australia, and New Zealand, it both addresses the theoretical underpinnings of a specific indigenous criminology and explores this concept's broader policy and practice implications for criminal justice at large. Written by leading criminologists specializing in indigenous peoples, Indigenous Criminology argues for the importance of indigenous knowledge and methodologies in shaping this field and suggests that the concept of colonialism is fundamental to understanding contemporary problems of criminology, such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality, and the high levels of violence in some indigenous communities. Prioritizing the voices of indigenous peoples, this book will make a significant and lasting contribution to the decolonizing of criminology.

Roads to Decolonisation: An Introduction to Thought from the Global South is an accessible new textbook that provides undergraduate students with a vital introduction to theory from the Global South and key issues of social justice, arming them with the tools to theorise and explain the social world away from dominant Global North perspectives. Arranged in four parts, it examines key thinkers, activists and theory-work from the Global South; theoretical concepts and socio-historical conditions associated with 'race' and racism, gender and sexuality, identity and (un)belonging in a globalised world and decolonisation and education; challenges to dominant Euro-American perspectives on key social justice issues, linking decolonial discourses to contemporary case studies. Each chapter offers an overview of key thinkers and activists whose work engages with social justice issues, many of whom are under-represented or left out of undergraduate humanities and social sciences textbooks in the North. This is essential reading for students of the humanities and social sciences worldwide, as well as scholars keen to embed Southern thought in their curricula and pedagogical practice.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to comprehensively explore Indigenous people’s contact with criminal justice systems in a contemporary and historical context. Drawing on comparative Indigenous material from North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it addresses both the theoretical underpinnings to the development of a specific Indigenous criminology, and canvasses the broader policy and practice implications for criminal justice. Written by leading criminologists specialising in Indigenous justice issues, the book argues for the importance of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to criminology, and suggests that colonialism needs to be a fundamental concept to criminology in order to understand contemporary problems such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality and the high levels of violence in some Indigenous communities. Prioritising the voices of Indigenous peoples, the work will make a significant contribution to the development of a decolonising criminology and will be of wide interest.