Is Criminology Broken?

 

The following blog entry is based on comments I made at the Critical Criminology symposium that took place at the University of Melbourne on  12-13 February 2025.

The purpose of the symposium was to try to kickstart the critical criminology conferences that used to occur regularly in the 2000s-2010's but had fallen away.

The comments were made during the pelnary panel session on the irst evening of the symposium, and addresses two interrelated questions:

'Is it ethically possible to work within the confines of Criminology and still undertake radical work'

Or

'Is the discipline irreparably broken and in need of dismantling and abolishing?'

 

Let’s break down the central question we, the panel have been asked to address, into its two main parts.

To the first part: Is it ethically possible to work within the confines of criminology and still undertake radical work?  Yes, absolutely: many, I would venture to suggest the majority of those involved in criminology in Australasia, continue to work within the discipline whilst remaining ignorant of the support they and the discipline provide to the racist, misogynist, homophobic criminal justice system. However, others are no doubt aware that their work provides to the continued violent and repressive strategies deployed by police against marginalised population, especially Indigenous peoples.

At the end of the day, it is possible to consider oneself as ‘working ethically within the confines of criminology’ because it is so easy for some to construct an ethics framework designed to insulating them from the barbs and critique of those who call into question, for example, the preferential use of non-engaging methodologies, as that wonderful term is defined and analysed by Antje Deckert.  For a classic example of this type of ‘cloaking’ strategy we need look to criminologists like Don Weatherburn who insulate themselves from critique of their 'non-engaging' research on Aboriginal peoples by cloaking themselves in the protective veil of scientism.

Is it possible to do radical work within a discipline that from its inception was, as revealed by the Nigerian scholar Biko Agozino, a control freak in service of the colonial project? Again, the answer is yes. And now I will make what appears at first glance a hugely contradictory claim: yes, it is indeed possible to work within criminology and do 'radical' work whole providing direct support to the settler-colonial state, because, from a critical Indigenous standpoint, what could be more radical than that?  From an Indigenous, community-centred derived ethics framework, nothing could be more ‘anti-ethical’ and therefore radical, than supporting the continued subjugation of the marginalised, the colonised, and the criminalised.

To the second part of the question, is the discipline irreparably broken?  The answer is no: to paraphrase a saying often used to describe the settler-colonial legal and justice systems, it is working just as it was intended to, as a key component  of the colonial project. And here of course I am talking to the administrative and authoritarian strands of the discipline, whose work I might add, dominates the construction  of crime control legislation, policy and practice in the Australasian context.

And because those strands dominate the policy process, talk of dismantling, of the abolition of criminology, is simply wasteful; it isn’t gunna happen. In fact, I will make a prediction as I head quickly towards retirement: in the not-too-distant future, as neo-liberal governments put the squeeze on ‘critical scholarship’ in terms of fthe withdrawal of funding and policy support, preferring ‘job ready pedagogy over critical thinking’, it will be us, the so-called radicals, who will eventually be dismantled and abolished within academic criminology through actions by Universities with a firm eye on their bottom line.

Now, ask me that same question from a critical Indigenous standpoint, is the discipline broken and should it be burned to the ground', and the answer is absolutely! 

Those of us in the know about what’s been going on within ANZSOC for decades with regards Indigenous issues, have known this action has been needed for a long time. Which is why so few of us attend the organisations annual conference,  or submit our research to its journal.

Almost a decade ago I wrote a chapter for a Palgrave handbook on Australasian criminology, edited by Antje and Rick Sarre, in which I described criminology as a tent that stank so bad of the stench of colonialism that it was best the Indigenous scholar group set up elsewhere.  Nothing has happened since then to convince me I was wrong, in fact, despite ANZSOC’s recent attempts at developing an Aboriginal strategy, the discipline’s treatment of Indigenous issues, communities and scholars continues along it historical trajectory of paternalism, condescension and colonialism. There are way too many examples to evidence that comment but let me refer to the online and offline abuse and hectoring of the likes of Amanda Porter and other Indigenous women scholars for daring to question the publication of a highly problematic work on Sudanese youth in the ANZSOC journal.

But probably my favourite example of how patronising and condescending the discipline can be towards Indigenous knowledge and scholars, we need only consider the evolution  of the latest criminological fad, Southern Criminology. One of its founding members, Kerry Carrington, has on a number of occasions, in keynote presentations, and in writing, claimed, without providing any evidence, that decolonising criminologies, such as Biko’s Counter-Colonial Criminology, or the sort of Indigenous criminology I do, are a) guilty of presenting all other criminologists as racist or on a ‘bandwagon’, and b) guilty of continuously romanticising the Indigenous life-world. 

As a result, Carrington claims that our criminologies are example of what she calls ‘negative decolonising projects’.  That’s right, because we Indigenous scholars call out Kerry and others for their dubius scholarship, such as claiming all-women police stations will be good for Aboriginal women without a) actually talking extensively to Aboriginal women, and b) without any consideration of policing as a colonial project, it is we who apparently are being ‘negative’. Such claims are, at best, unevidenced nonsense. 

And on that issue I want to draw your attention to another reason why our trust in whitestream criminology is so low: Some of those involved in the development of this Southern Criminology are sitting in this room, so let me direct this question at you and your colleagues. Why is it that some of your colleagues have been making these unevidenced, inflammatory statements about Indigenous and other decolonising criminologies for years, and I have yet to hear or read anything from the supposed demi-Gods of this movement who supposedly are all about ‘democratising’ criminological knowledge and committed to social justice on these claims. Why haven’t any of you called them out?  Silence is complicity, is it not?

And so on to my last point: For the last five years or so I’ve been focused mostly on what I and other Indigenous scholars call our ‘decolonial project’, throughout which I have been looking for ways to directly influence decolonisation work within criminology.  Unfortunately, recent events have stymied my plans to do this work WITHIN the Academy, and brought me back full circle to the question I posed in the ANZSOC book chapter I alluded to earlier: some tents you just don’t want to be sitting in. I think that the discipline, along with the institutions it is situated within, are mostly interested in decolonisation like they were about 'indigenisation' in the 1990s, as a way of making token gestures that mask their reluctance to institute any real, meaningful, systemic change and support Indigenous self-determination.

And so, I will leave you with this little gem: I think it best that we as Indigenous scholars, and there is now a fairly sizable group of us here in Australasia who think this way, should continue on the journey to developing our own representative body. After all, we don’t need you (ANZSOC, criminology as a whole): not your conferences, not your journals, because we have our own. We should leave the discipline of criminology to ‘decolonise’ itself as it sees fit. And I ask you all to contemplate this question: think of one reason, one solid reason why we as Indigenous scholars should waste our emotional and intellectual energy on helping you to decolonise?  

To paraphrase the well-known Maori film director Taiki Waititi, when he was recently asked to speak to a group about how best to decolonise Hollywood: “You fu*ked it, you fix it.”

 

 

A Critique of 'Southern Criminology'

Similar to my presentation on Southern Criminology at the 2019 American Society of Criminology conference (and posted here on this blog), below is the link to a recently published commentary on the claims-making of one of the key architects of this recent criminological 'school', Kerry Carrington. Both Carrington's comments and the response (by established critical criminologists Harry Blagg, Thalia Anthony, Rob Webb and Antje Deckert) were published in the British Journal of Criminology blog.  I have also included the link to Carrington's 'critique' of decolonising approaches in criminology, for comparison: enjoy!

In Defence of Decolonisation

https://thebscblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/in-defence-of-decolonisation-a-response-to-southern-criminology/?fbclid=IwAR1CzbJKPLqGtFZGNXdSh1b7J1hSpI864qyauxsnda5_a_AvobtKrL3X3yA

Decolonizing Criminology through the Inclusion of Epistemologies of the South

https://thebscblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/decolonizing-criminology-through-the-inclusion-of-epistemologies-of-the-south/

Presentation to the Annual Whanau Ora Symposium, Dunedin, April 2021

 Kia ora all

Attached to this blog is a presentation I did to the annual Whanau Ora Symposium, held in Dunedin in April 2021, a critical commentary on racial profiling and crime control policy development in Aotearoa New Zealand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyaaHo7h-TA&t=532s 

The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology

The following text laid the foundation of a presentation I gave at Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, 2 November 2019, titled 'The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology'

During a visit to New Zealand in June 2019 a friend of mine, a lecturer at an American University, told me he was 1 of 3 associate editors at an International publishing house that was considering a number of proposals for a series on criminology, one of which was the book - Indigenous Criminology - that Chris and I wrote. When considering the applications the two white criminologists questioned the need for 'another criminology like this one', and my friend responded by asking 'why not', partly in light of all the new criminologies that had been accepted into the club in recent years, including Peacemaking Criminology, Post-Colonial Criminology, Cultural Criminology, and the latest member, Criminology of the Global South (Southern Criminology). 

At first glance, mentioning all these new criminology's appears to support the argument of the 2 Pakeha (European) criminologists, but my colleague continued by making the point that all these 'new criminologies' had largely evolved from the same space, influenced by the same epistemological milieu as all previous criminologies, namely from the space created by the white, privileged academic community. And we can say with certainty that apart from  a few outliers, such as Chris Cunneen, Harry Blagg and Antje Deckert, that these criminology's had a lot to say about Indigenous peoples, about African American's and so forth, despite the fact that few of their adherents had lowered themselves to engage directly with us (with Cultural Criminology a notable exception), preferring instead to keep their distance and thus, their 'objectivity'. In other words, an Indigenous Criminology was necessary because of the lack of Indigenous input into the 'other criminologies' and the general reluctance of white criminologists to respectfully engage with us.

Thanks to the stance taken by my friend and colleague, the book Indigenous Criminology was published in 2016.

I submit that had the book proposal in question had been for 'a general theory of crime', or a 'post-modern criminology' and not one founded on Indigenous experiences, that the debate would have been very different, if indeed it would have occurred at all. At the very least the focus of discussion would have been very different; were the right authors and authorities present, did the perspective privilege white theorists and methodologies, that sort of thing. Of course, this is pure speculation on my part, but mainstream criminology, or perhaps more accurately whitestream criminology, has form in this regard, meaning a general disregard for the perspectives and experiences of Nga Morehu (the socially marginalised or unwanted), unless it is mediated and interpreted through their ideological and epistemological lens. Now, let me provide an example of what I mean when I say that mainstream criminology has 'form', by discussing the position of the English criminologist Pat Carlen on what makes for 'good criminology'.  

In a chapter entitled Against Evangelism in Academic Criminology: For Criminology as a Scientific Art, Carlen rails against what she sees as the proliferation of boutique criminologies, approaches she describes as "those academy-based criminologies which have variously self-branded as 'critical', 'cultural', or 'public'", accusing them of "at times revealing evangelistic tendencies that pose a threat to their capacity for the open debate that each of them espouses". And what exactly are these so-called evangelistic tendencies Carlen speaks of? It appears that Carlen's main issue is that these criminologies suffer from twin allegiances, to 'academic criminology' and all that requires in terms of supplication to the alter of the white theoretical Gods and the supposed rationality of empiricism, and 'criminology politics', by which she means adherence to the more leftist tendencies in ordert to critique state-centred/sponsored criminological work, and taking a proactive stance to talk with and then on behalf of Nga Morehu. Their socio-political commitments, so Carlen alleges, need to be reined in, meaning that "the evangelistic strains in these boutique criminologies need to be confronted" if criminology as a scientific art is to continue to have any social significance.

Carlen refers to these approaches as evangelistic because of a tendency to expect members to adhere to an orthodoxy, a set of principles that demand adherents demonstrate commitment to an orthodoxy, as opposed to one based on the practice of empiricism. In fact, of these supposed evangelistic criminological strains, Carlen contends:

"They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary academic criminology". 

As an Indigenous criminologist, nothing Carlen said about boutique criminologies is new. Her words mirror a common strain of epistemological bias and snobbery often directed from whitestream criminology, towards ‘other’ forms of knowledge, and in the settler-colonial context the ‘other’ is often Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous research. Which brings me back to Don Weatherburn’s flippant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge and experience, and therefore Indigenous scholarship, and that of our critical non-Indigenous collaborators, such as Chris Cunneen. In stating that there is nothing to be learnt from us about what causes crime, or how best or most effectively respond to it, Weatherburn is portraying non-Western knowledge as ‘subjective’, as ‘unscientific’.

Where have we heard this type of comment before?

Isn't that exactly how our knowledge, our epistemologies have been represented since first contact?

According to Canadian scholars Proulx and Woolford, every colonial epoch produces projects designed to support the settler-colonial states subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, let's refer to them as colonial projects. Woolford for one imagines the process of colonisation and subsequent settler-colonial government, as a highly sophisticated mesh made up of inter-locking meta, meso and micro levels.  Each level contains projects of varying complexity, interconnectedness and focus (meaning the specific role it plays in the colonial process, and therefore in the process of dispossession).

A whole series of inter-related projects were formulated across the mesh that were designed to extricate us from arable land, and to nullify our ability to impede the colonial enterprise. Key projects included Missionary, Research and/or Native schools, legislation banning our languages and specific cultural practices, such as the Tohunga Suppression Act in New Zealand. And then there were the nefarious colonial projects, such as the ideological destruction of the 'character' of Indigenous peoples, or what could be more accruately described as the 'Ideology of Race'. This was an important project for the establishment of colonial governance because it sought to discredit Indigenous language, knowledge, cultural practices and institutions. At the very heart of this project was the key ideological statement that underpinned so much of colonial policy, namely that 'Indigenous knowledge is folk-knowledge, based on myth and primitive religious belief and practice. Therefore, it is incomparable with western knowledge, which is derived from scientific inquiry and enlightenment thinking'. 

Now, at the macro, meso and micro levels we find key edifices that provide the superstructure upon which settler-colonialism was built and continues to thrive today. Here we find a project of especial potency, the criminal justice system, a ‘technology of oppression’ as Alison Young has described it, and Agozino, “a control freak discipline”, one that is ably supported by the academic discipline of criminology. The potency of this multi-level colonial project derives from the fact that it is the conduit through which the settler-colonial state can legitimately deploy violence against its citizens. 

As a sub-component of the law, criminal justice was, and still is, a powerful (civilising) colonial project in two significant ways:

i) it ensures that the definitions of what constitutes crime and social harm were based on Eurocentric understandings of those terms; and

ii) it provides a platform for the deployment of structural violence by the state against Indigenous peoples considered not to have adhered to Western standards of behaviour ala the ‘reasonable man of the law’, especially those who happened to be residing on good pastoral land or atop mineral deposits, or who dared directly challenge the hegemony of the colonial state, either through armed rebellion, or non-violence resistance.

And what of criminology? Social sciences like criminology placed in the hands of the settler-colonial state the tools to identify, name and (arguably) combat the moral sewage threatening to spill out from the geographic space of the (Indigenous) damned. And one of the key ‘sciences of morality’ was criminology, a discipline that’s conception, gestation and birth has been traced through the colonial epoch. Furthermore, criminology, joined at birth to the settler-colonial state, continues to thrive through a sustained focus on the behaviours and attitudes that fuelled its conception – emotionality, incontinence and contamination, and upon those sections of the community considered by the settler-colonial state to be most threatening to social order, the poor, the recalcitrant, and the Indigenous. 

How different are the views of Pat Carlen from those made by early Missionaries, or colonial agents denigrating Indigenous knowledge? Although to be fair, Carlen was not directly challenging the legitimacy of Indigenous Criminology, but nonetheless she disparages any new forms of the discipline that do not adhere to the precepts of scientific criminology, including objectivity and value neutrality. She intimates that the political posturing of said criminologies is 'damaging to the brand' that is (in my view) best understood as corporatised criminology. 

The Australian 'quantitative' social scientist, Don Weatherburn is a slightly different beast (or criminologist) than the Pat Carlen's of the white academy, appearing as he does - tiume and time again - less concerned with image politics and more with patch protection. He weaponises the veil of scientism, the ideological cloak that legitimises his knowledge and others like him, thus presenting their ‘science’ as the only legitimate source of criminological knowledge that can or should influence the development of crime control policies and interventions, especially when it comes to the ‘Indigenous Problem’.

The charge of evangelism brought against boutique criminologies like Cultural Criminology, or Indigenous Criminology, comes from the same well as the colonial project of ideology discussed earlier: it denotes a hierarchy of knowledge about crime and social harm. Those that cloak themselves in the cloak of scientism are therefore and thereafter, ‘scientific’ and thus legitimate; those that are not, are simply 'boutique'.  The former produces knowledge that is ‘solid’, factual and trustworthy’, the latter, knowledge that is unformed, subjective and untrustworthy. 

Let us return for a moment to Pat Carlen’s supposedly devastating critique of the new, boutique criminologies:

They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary criminology.

I argue quite the opposite - their focus on criminological politics, their willingness to take a stance, to speak to and of Nga Morehu, is the most desirable and powerful features of these contemporary, so-called 'boutique' criminologies. 

From the perspective of those who practice Carlen’s scientific criminology, it is the ‘science’ and the implicit objectivity and methods that establish ‘facts about crime’ that distinguishes it from these other, subjective approaches, and that should provide it a natural place at the policy table. But I say that these administrative, or perhaps more accurately, authoritarian criminologies, are distinguished by a number of other features other than their ‘science’, including:

i) their focus on research and social inquiry into actions the state defines as 'criminal';

ii) that they confine their critical gaze to issues related to those communities the state considers are 'problematic'; more often than not people of colour and working class youth, albeit minus any significant, meaningful engagement with these communities;

iii) confine their social inquiry to issues and questions that the policy sector deems important, for which they receive significant renumeration via the establishment of contractual, mutually beneficial relationships; 

iv) limit their critical analysis of state systems, policies and programmes to programmatic effectiveness via evaluations devoid of historical context, and the wider political economy of state domination of justice in the neo-liberal moment, and lastly

v) empower themselves through the veil of scientism I spoke of earlier, an ideological construct that privileges their approach to measuring the Indigenous life-world, whilst denigrating Indigenous (and other) forms of knowledge. 

And what has this criminology brought us?  More policing, and not of the communitarian kind sometimes enjoyed by white communities, but of the ‘hot spot’, militaristic tactics, violent style of policing that we have been subjected to for decades. Is it effective? Well, that depends on how you measure 'effectiveness'; if by effective we mean more Aboriginal people arrested and sent to prison, then yes.  If we mean more just and less violent, then no.

In comparison, Chris Cunneen and I envisioned an Indigenous approaches to criminological inquiry based on the following core principles:

1.   Taking a stance of committed objectivity.  This is as much a political stance as it is an epistemological one.

2. Carrying on the theme of ‘politics’, the second principle entails ‘speaking truth to power’

3. The third is to ‘give back to the communities who have privileged you with their knowledge and experience’, and not just in the form of sending them a copy of your journal article.

4. Indigenous criminological research should be ‘real’: Meaning it must come from within Indigenous peoples and their communities.

I would like now to propose a fifth principle: this principle will encapsulate all the others, an over-arching principle, if you like, and it is devised as a direct response to, rebuff the position taken by Carlen, Weatherburn and others like them; it is:

5.  That Indigenous Criminology should be evangelical; in the sense that it should strive to be subjective and biased; political, in that practitioners must take a stance that clearly aligns with the needs of Indigenous communities and not the state; and it should set firm boundaries regarding membership, by rejecting those unable or unwilling to adhere to the tikanga [philosophies] that form the basis of Indigenous knowledge. 

In response to Carlen I say that these are the most desirable and potentially most self-affirming aspects of the best of contemporary Indigenous academic criminology.

Lastly, one thing we must do is avoid wasting energy railing against the negative representations of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous scholarship. The features that administrative and authoratarian criminologists offer as our weaknesses, are in fact what makes our work powerful, different and meaningful. In fact I would go further and argue that the reasons why our work is attacked for being 'too political' and 'too subjective', is because the richness of our research demonstrates the vacuous nature of the work of much of corporatist criminology. 

Presentation to the Griffith University Symposium: Bringing the 'Alternative' Back into Restorative Justice, Wednesday 25 November 2020

Kia ora all

Here is the link to my recorded keynote of the Griffith University Symposium Bringing the 'Alternative' Back into Restorative Justice, held on Wednesday 25 November 2020.

The title of the presentation was 'Restorative Justice in the Land of the Long White Lie'

Old Wine in an Old Bottle? An Indigenous Commentary on the Criminology of the Global South

The idea for the title of this presentation came from a discussion I had in early 2019 with a prominent Australian Aboriginal scholar regarding the Criminology of the Global South (from here-on-in Southern Criminology), during which he described engaging with material produced by Australian members of this ‘new’ criminological movement, as akin to drinking ‘old wine out of a dirty bottle’.  The old wine refers to the rehashed Eurocentric theories and focus of the new criminology, while the dirty bottle referred to the fact that Southern Criminology arose from the same bastion of white privilege, the neo-liberal university, as had most of the schools of criminology that have existed previously.

According to advocates, Southern Criminology is the latest criminological project seeking to ‘decolonise’ the discipline, removing it from its ‘Northern’, Eurocentric foundations and theoretical bias.

The esteemed British scholar Matthews, described Southern Criminology as “probably the most significant theoretical development in the recent period”, and just recently Fonseca described the movement as “a gush of fresh air in the debate involving studies of crime, crime control and punishment” (quoted in Moosava, 2019).

I agree with the gush of air part of that last quote, but I not as yet convinced of its freshness, given the conduct of some of its Australian adherents towards Indigenous scholars and scholarship over the past decade, and the lack of meaningful engagement with our work and with Indigenous peoples in general.  

Unlike Leon Moosavi’s paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2019, I will not be offering a ‘friendly critique’ of this supposedly ‘new’ criminological movement.  If you’ve read Moosavi’s paper you will recall that he chose to offer a friendly critique Southern Criminology because he wanted to enhance the project due in part, to a belief that it has a solidarity with the principles of decolonising criminology rather than scepticism about its necessity or potential worth to the cause of social (and especially to Indigenous) justice. Well right now I am sceptical not so much of the intent of Southern Criminologists, because thus far they are saying pretty much all the right things - racism bad, inequality bad, free us from the shackles of ‘Northern’ theory, ‘decolonise the discipline’, and speak for the disaffected - etc, etc.  However, demonstrating support for decolonisation required much more than a few statements included in an article here or there, or collected edition/handbook.  We, and by that I mean Indigenous peoples, have heard it all before, so we tend to judge those who claim to be our ‘allies’ on their actual conduct, or, as this is an academic exercise, on the content of their research (and their conduct during and after it), what they say about us, who they have invited to speak about us, and if they are engaging respectfully and meaningfully with us. 

The theorist who appears to have greatly influenced the idea for a Southern Criminology is Raewyn Connell, author of that well-known work Southern Theory (2007).  In that work Connell advanced the argument for the ‘South’ to create its own body of theory and knowledge.  Her reasoning for offering this proposition: because of the orientalist attitude that pervades the social sciences that views academic scholarship and knowledge emanating from the South as of poor quality and not worth consideration.

As an Indigenous person, and researcher, I do not entirely disagree with Connell’s assessment of the social sciences. In my experience this attitude is pervasive within the discipline of criminology; for example when a scholar like Don Weatherburn write as recently as 2014, that there is nothing for us to learn from Indigenous knowledge about the causes of crime, because all we need to know we can get from western science (a not uncommon sentiment amongst Australian criminologists in my experience), then Connell is clearly onto something.  But she, just like many of the scholars involved in Southern Criminology in my part of the world, are talking about a situation and an issue that we Indigenous people have long known about, have been researching, and actively seeking to address.  One must wonder to what extent Southern Criminology is yet another example of a bunch of (predominantly white) criminologists turning up extremely late to our party…. largely uninvited.

The idea that Australian criminology is part of the periphery – a central platform of the rationale for Southern Criminology - greatly amuses me.  Why?  Because of the long and ongoing history of bigotry within Australian Criminology and the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes towards Indigenous people and our knowledge.  I’ll return to this idea of Australian criminology as some backward, ignored, lonely bunch, looking with longing to the Great North just to be recognised, like some teenager at the school dance hoping someone, anyone, will ask him or her to dance, a little later.

So, let us briefly discuss this project, this Southern Criminology and in so doing I am going to skim briefly and broadly over the main arguments (for its existence), etc, for a detailed understanding read the extant literature:

It starts with the observation that criminological theories and concepts have largely been produced in ‘the West’, meaning Europe, the North America.  It is also assumed that the ‘knowledge of the North’ can be readily transported to the periphery, and that this knowledge will be relevant anywhere (Moosavi, 2019), whether psycho-therapeutic programs or policing tactics, or entire prison regimes, as in the case of New Zealand’s importation the Integrated Offender Management system from Canada in the early 2000’s. 

Let me just pause here for a moment because I need to say something about this portrayal of the ‘North’.  As an Indigenous scholar I need to say that when we hear or read the term criminology of North American and Western Europe, the moment it hits our brain it is translated into White Criminology: criminology by and for white people who then do us poor natives a huge favour by offering us their gift of criminological knowledge to fix crime problems generated mostly from the colonising behaviour of their ancestors, or indeed themselves, if my experience of Australian criminologists is anything to go by.

Moosava (2019) also reports that Southern criminologists are motivated by the need to challenge the largely one directional nature of knowledge flow (North to South) in order to attain a more rounded criminological knowledge of crime and social harm.  In this regard, much of what I have read thus far from the Australasian practitioners of Southern Criminology leads me to believe that what they are doing or intend to do is privilege the knowledge and experiences of marginalised communities.

Any attempt by members of Southern Criminology to prioritise the experiences of the marginalised, if this principle were to result in concrete action on their part, would indeed be welcomed by Indigenous communities.  But of course, some of us are already doing just that.  And so to presage one of my critiques of Southern Criminology - at least the Australian variant - nothing I’ve read so far about their motivations or the core focus of their work is in fact new, as I stated previously, Indigenous scholars have been doing it, and not just saying it, for decades.

I agree with Moosava’s point that so far Southern criminologists have not offered enough reflection on whether the decolonisation of criminology is even possible given the discipline’s Western origins, and its long and continuing parasitic relationship with the state.  The difficulty of that disentanglement from the colonialist and paternalistic mindset of criminology I will highlight with a couple of examples below.

Secondly, I also agree with Moosava’s contention that the Australian branch of Southern Criminology is highly Eurocentic in terms of theory and personnel.  He rightly points out that in the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South released in 2018, almost half of the 79 contributors are based in Australian institutions, and the vast majority were white.  This is reflective of the way in which Southern Criminology is dominated by Australian criminologists to such an extent that Moosava writes that it may be more accurate to describe it as ‘Australian Criminology’.

At this point Southern Criminology is not representative of the disaffected communities who truly represent the South, such as the Indigenous peoples residing in settler-colonial jurisdictions. For this reason, its claims to be a decolonising project are groundless, unless of course they mean they are decolonising themselves, in which case we wish them all the best.

This brings us to the inevitable question: how far ‘South’ do you need to be, to be able to truly, accurately call yourself a ‘Southern Criminology’; how disaffected, ignored or marginalised?  Well, I put it to you that I needs to be a lot further south than the comfortable, privileged position of academics in the wealthy academic institutions of Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

Right now, I am extremely pessimistic about Southern Criminology, especially the leadership of its Australian branch, can engage with our experiences in a meaningful way.  For example, comments by one of the founders of Southern Criminology during a keynote speech at a recent, major criminology conference, draw attention to the continued prevalence of ‘old school’ attitudes towards Indigenous scholarship within the ‘movement’.  During question time they were asked what made this ‘new criminology’ different from others that seek to decolonise the discipline, such as post-colonial criminology, peacemaker criminology, counter-colonial and Indigenous criminology’s, to which they answered: ‘these criminology’s romanticise the other’, meaning they mythologise our old ways of doing justice and misrepresent the causes of Indigenous offending.  As I have said in an earlier blog, this portrayal of ‘our criminology’ does not reflect the research and publications we have produced about Indigenous peoples and crime.  How is this attitude any different from Don Weatherburn’s ignorant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge?  I put it to you all that it is not.

I want to finish on one last point: in a 2016 article, Carrington et al, all leaders in the development of Southern Criminology, stated that “[t]o be clear… our purpose is not to add to the growing catalogue of new criminology’s... [Southern Criminology] seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the global North... [It] seeks to work with and complement—to Southernize—other established and emerging fields in criminology: feminist, green, postcolonial, queer, rural, cultural and Asian. (2016: 11; emphasis mine).  The wording is unfortunately, because it leads one to ask, are they seeking to Southernise, or Colonise these other criminology’s?  It also gives the impression that something vital is missing from them, without clarifying exactly what ‘it’ is, and what they offer that is better.  And so, when Southern Criminologists call for ‘the periphery to invade the centre’ (Brown 2018: 96), some may recoil at what they might feel is imperialist language.  Again, I ask are they trying to decolonise or colonise?

Ok, so, how do we explain the strange conduct of some of the Australian contingent?  I think that Leon Moosavi, in his article from 2019, hits the nail on the head when he wrote that one of the most urgent matters for Southern Criminology to address is whether Australia should be considered as part of the Global South.  Mark Brown (2018: 93) has also identified this as a concern, stating that ‘Southern criminology faces its own existential question: what makes you Southern?’  This question divides opinion amongst proponents of Southern criminology. Some believe that Australia is one of the ‘selected enclaves of the symbolic north located south of the equator’ (Donnermeyer 2017: 128), whereas others emulate Raewyn Connell’s view that Australia is marginalized in similar ways to other Global South countries (Connell 2007: 212).

Australian scholarship may often be ignored by those in the United States and the United Kingdom, and Australia’s geographic location may make it harder for Australian scholars to participate in international academic events, but Australia is still a country that is developed, wealthy, stable, autonomous and privileged, meaning that suggesting that Australia is part of the Global South is problematic. At best, Australia may be part of the ‘semiperiphery’ (Medina 2011), but it still does not share the same hardship as the Asian, African and Latin American countries that are typically considered as part of the Global South, which is noteworthy because it has been suggested that a key component of ‘epistemologies of the South’ is that they comprise ‘knowledge born in struggle’ (Santos 2014: x).

The idea that Australian criminology is isolated from its Northern counterparts is nonsense.  Overall, their knowledge is not borne of struggle as Santos contends is a key marker of Southern Criminology, unless you define ‘struggle’ as receiving a lukewarm coffee from a café on the way to work.  If you want to see knowledge borne of struggle then go talk to Indigenous and African American scholars and we’ll tell you about our experiences of dealing with racists in the academy, of having our knowledge denigrated, our cultural practices and languages incorporated into departmental and institutional strategic plans (without meaningful funding attached); our people used as fodder as members of the academy work to credentilise themselves to move up in seniority.

The truth is we are already ‘Southern’ and we don’t need a bunch of white criminologists to show us what is required to decolonise the discipline; we’ve been doing it for a lot longer than this latest criminological fad was conceived.  Therefore, I do not advocate for the decolonisation of criminology; instead I call for the formulation of our own social justice-oriented discipline.  Why?  Because I believe our energy is best directed at the needs of our own communities, rather than wasting it on showing white academics how to behave more ethically.  In the end, it is not our job as Indigenous scholars to fix the problems of whitecentric criminology – let’s leave them to ‘southernise’ themselves.

References

Brown, M (2018) Southern Criminology in the Post-colony: More than a ‘Derivative Discourse?, in K. Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott and M. Sozzo (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 83-104.

Carrington, K; Sozzo, M and Hogg, R (2016) Southern Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, 56: 1–20.

Connell, R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Donnermeyer, J (2017) The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6: 118–32.

Medina, J (2011) Doing Criminology in the ‘Semi-Periphery’ and the ‘Periphery’, in C. Smith, S. Zhang and R. Barberet (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of International Criminology. New York: Routledge: 13-23.

Moosavi, L (2019) A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology, 59: 257-275.

Santos, B (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Weatherburn, D (2014) Arresting Incarceration: Pathways Out of Indigenous Imprisonment. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Community Research Webinar: Challenges and Opportunites for addressing inequities of the NZ justice system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bGsga9eaI&t=125