Counter-Colonial Criminology

Biko Agozino

Description

This book is about how the history of colonialism has shaped the definition of crime and justice systems not only in former colonies but also in colonialist countries. Biko Agozino argues that criminology in the West was originally tested in the colonies and then brought back to mother countries - in this way, he claims, the colonial experience has been instrumental in shaping modern criminology in colonial powers.



He looks at how radical critiques of mainstream criminology by critical feminist and postmodernist thinkers contribute to an understanding of the relationship between colonial experience and criminology. But he also shows that even critical feminist and postmodernist assessments of conventional criminology do not go far enough as they remain virtually silent on colonial issues.



Biko Agozino considers African and other postcolonial literature and contributions to counter colonial criminology, their originality, relevance and limitations. Finally he advocates a 'committed objectivity' approach to race-class-gender criminology investigations in order to come to terms with imperialistic and neo-colonialist criminology.
Acknowledgement

Table of contents

Introduction

1. The Enlightenment and Euro American Theories of the Judicial Process

2. From Determinism to Meaning: The Emergence of Labeling Perspective

3. From Societal Reaction to Questions of Power: From Labelling to Radical Criminology

4. Feminist Perspectives and Critical Criminology

5. Lesbian Rape: Maternal Metaphors for the Patriarchal State and International Conflict Resolution

6. Post-Structuralism and Positivism in Criminological Theory

7. Social Fiction Sui Generis: The Fairy Tale Structure of Criminological Theory

8. Executive lawlessness and the struggle for democracy in Africa

9. Radical Criminology In African Literature'

10. Committed Objectivity in Race-Class-Gender Research

11. How Scientific is Criminal Justice? A Methodological Critique of research on McCleskey V. Kemp and other capital cases.

12. What is Institutionalised? The Race-Class-Gender Articulation of Stephen Lawrence’

13. ‘Criminal Records: The Toughest, The Police and The Thieves; The Policing of Peter Tosh and Popular Culture'

Conclusion: Beyond Criminological Orientalism.

Bibliography

About The Author

Endonotes

Sujets

• Human Rights
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849641449
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Counter-Colonial Criminology

A Critique of Imperialist Reason

Biko Agozino

With a Foreword by Stephen Pfohl

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Biko Agozino 2003

The right of Biko Agozino to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1886 X hardback ISBN 0 7453 1885 1 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Agozino, Biko. Counter-colonial criminology : a critique of imperialist reason / Biko Agozino ; with a foreword by Stephen Pfohl. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–1886–X (hardback) –– ISBN 0–7453–1885–1 (pbk.) 1. Criminology. 2. Imperialism. I. Title. HV6018 .A37 2003 364'.09––dc21 2003004580

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword

Introduction

1. The Enlightenment and Euro-American Theories of the Judicial Process Enlightened Retribution and Utilitarianism The Rational Ideal Type and Orientalism Whose Conscience is the Collective Conscience under Colonialism? From the Micro-Physics of Power to the Bifurcation Thesis

2. From Determinism to Meaning: The Emergence of the Labelling Perspective Theoretical and Historical Background Symbolic Interactionism Phenomenology and Labelling The Power to Name as a Focus An Assessment of the Labelling Perspective

3. From Societal Reaction to Questions of Power: From Labelling to Radical Criminology From the Symbolic to the Structural Back to Classical Marxism Practical Implications A Critique of Critical Criminology What is New about New Realism? Realism, Neoclassicism and Sociological Determinism The Examples of Counter-Colonial Crminology

4.Feminist Perspectives and Critical Criminology Feminist Empiricism Standpoint Feminism Postmodern Feminism

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13 16 22

26

35

40 42 44 45 46 47

50 50 51 54 56 57 58 60

63 64 66 72

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7.

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Counter-Colonial Criminology

Lesbian Rape: Maternal Metaphors for the Patriarchal State and International Conflict Resolution The Literature of Rape The Sisters Do It for Themselves

Poststructuralism and Positivism in Criminological Theory

Social FictionSui Generis: The Fairy Tale Structure of Criminological Theory Tensions between Facticity and Validity The Murder of Reality The Fictional Character of Criminological Theory

Executive Lawlessness and the Struggle for Democracy in Africa What is Crime and What is Punishment? Democracy, Law and Order as Organised Violence Realism, Authoritarianism and Decolonisation Democracy as Redress for Victimised Society

Radical Criminology in African Literature The Problem of Crime What is Crime and What Causes Crime? How is Law Related to Society? How Should Society Respond to Offending Behaviour? Discussion and Conclusion

Committed Objectivity in Race–Class–Gender Research Race–Class–Gender Identity in Research Objectivity is not Positionlessness The Example of the Institute of Race Relations What is Committed Objectivity?

How Scientific is Criminal Justice? A Methodological Critique of Research on McCleskeyv.Kempand Other Capital Cases The Case of McCleskey Investigation and Adjudication as Research Science has No Room for Finality A Scientific Argument Against the Death Penalty

75 78 82

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113 114 121 130 134

140 141 145 150 153 155

157 161 163 169 171

173 174 176 178 180

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A Critique of Criminological Research on the Death Penalty 182 Mumia Abu-Jamal: Another Ken Saro-Wiwa? 187 Conclusion: How Scientific are Criminal Justice Sciences? 190

What is Institutionalised? The Race–Class–Gender Articulation of Stephen Lawrence The Sociology of Institutionalisation Institutionalised Racism–Sexism–Classism A Letter from Harlem Windrush: A Law and Social Justice Workshop Conclusion

Criminal Records: The Toughest, the Police and the Thieves: The Policing of Peter Tosh and Popular Culture ‘Everyone is talking about crime, crime, tell me who are the criminals’ – Tosh ‘I am wanted dred and alive, no place to hide’ – Tosh ‘Get up stand up, stand up for your rights’ – Tosh and Marley Conclusion: Groundings

Conclusion: Beyond Criminological Orientalism

Bibliography Index

194 197 202 204 207 211

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Acknowledgements

All the errors in this book are mine alone. However, as with all scholarly works, many people share the credit with me. I will first acknowledge the support of my colleagues and friends who read drafts of the manuscript and gave me the encouragement to get it published. They include Herman Schwendinger and Rosemary Galli, who wrote detailed comments that greatly helped to improve the final version; Horace Campbell, who inspired me with his belief that this work should be urgently published; Stephen Pfohl, who was very generous with praise and even offered a wonderful Foreword; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who offered encouraging words after reading the manuscript. Similar encouragement came from Ifi Amadiume, Olu Oguibe, Esiaba Irobi, Abubakar Momoh, Ihekweaba Onwudiwe, Nkiru Nzegwu and Oka Obono. Of course, my greatest thanks go to the editorial team of Pluto Press for their patience and support. Stuart Hall taught me a lot in London. Love to you all! I would also like to give a shout to my students at Bendel State University (now known as Ambrose Ali University), Ekpoma; the University of Calabar; the Open University; Edinburgh University; the Liverpool John Moores University; and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania on whom I tested these ideas from when I started teaching at university level in the mid-1980s. Their questions and comments have challenged me to clarify my thinking over the years. In this respect, I would like to acknowledge the colleagues who encouraged my interest in theoretical work. These include in Ekpoma, Jerry Dibua, Bona Chizea, B.I.C. Ijeoma, the late Frank Mowah and many others. In Calabar, I learnt a lot from my teachers and colleagues, Eskor Toyo, Edwin and Bene Madunagu, Herbert Erwe-Erwe, David Johnson, Akpan Ekpo, Princewill Alozie, Yakubu Ochefu, Okonette Ekanem, Ike Anyanike, Bassey Ekpo Bassey, Tunde Ahonsi, Stella Ogbuagu, Daniel Offiong, Victor Uchendu, Joseph Ottong, Edet Abasiekong, Len Bloom and Joseph Ugal. Colin Sumner, Anthony Bottoms and Alison Morris provided inspiration at Cambridge University. At Edinburgh University, I benefited from the theoretical clarity of David Garland, Peter Young, Beverley Brown, Neil McCormick and Zenon Bankowski. Notable colleagues who assisted my scholarly growth at Liverpool John Moores University

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include Roger Evans, Joe Sim, Pete Gill, Steve Tombs, Alarna Barton, Dave McEvoy, Marion Price, Gill Hall, Brian Scott, Jon Binnie, George Mair, Joseph Akomode and many others. At Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I would like to acknowledge the encourgagement of my colleagues Yolanda Scott, Tim Austin, Nanci Wilson, Jake Gibbs, Rosemary Gido, Chris Zimmerman, Imogen Moyer, Kwasi Yirenkyi, Amadu Ayebo, Tony Joseph, Veronica Watson, Jim Dougherty, Brenda Mitchel, Carol Young, Yaw Asamoah, Bill Oblitey, Harvey Holtz, Carol Princes and John Orife, and my graduate assistants John Hardee and Patrick Harvey for their help with chasing up the references. My special thanks go to the Senate Research Grants Committee at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for supporting the completion of this book with a Summer Fellowship in 2001, which enabled me to visit the East African colonial archives at Syracuse University for one week. Thanks to the family of Horace Campbell for generously hosting my family during our trip to Syracuse and for lending me the use of their rich collection on African history. Assata Zerai and Che Fanon were also very supportive of my research in Syracuse. The same Senate Research Grants Committee awarded me an interna- tional conference grant, which enabled me to present the introduction to this book at the XV World Congress of Sociology, in Brisbane, Australia, 2002. Thanks also to my Dean, Brenda Carter, for supplementing the conference grant and thereby making it possible for me to benefit from the comments of my peers before sending the manuscript to the publishers. The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University gave my research a boost by awarding me an unfunded fellowship for the summer of 2002. Although I was not able to take up the fellowship due to lack of funding, the fact that they selected my project for such a recognition encouraged me to work harder to complete it on schedule. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the sacrifices of my immediate family who suffered my long hours in the office and constant reading at home and still provided the warmth and encouraged the laughter that sustained me during the period of writing. Also, at the back of my mind during the writing was the story told repeatedly by my father about how he liberated himself from a colonial jail by pissing against the door when they refused to let him out to ease himself following his arrest for selling gunpowder without a licence. Finally, I wish to acknowledge that slightly different versions of some of the chapters in this book were previously published in

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refereed journals. These include: chapter 7, ‘Social FictionSui Generis: The Fairy Tale Structure of Criminological Theory’, inThe Critical Criminologist, June 1999; chapter 9, ‘Radical Criminology in African Literature’, inInternational Sociology, Vol. 10, No. 3, Winter 1995; chapter 10, ‘Committed Objectivity in Race–Class–Gender Research’, inQuantity & Quality: International Journal of Methodology, Vol. 33, No. 4, November 1999; chapter 11, ‘How Scientific is Criminal Justice? A Methodological Critique of Research onMcCleskeyv.Kemp and other Capital Cases’, inThe National Black Law Journal, December 2002; and chapter 12, What is Institutionalised? The Race-Class- Gender Articulation of Stephen Lawrence’, inBritish Criminology Conference: Selected Proceedings, Vol. 3, 2000.

Foreword

Victimisation is not always interpersonal or intergroup, it is sometimes also structural and institutionalised. The decolonisa- tion of victimisation from the expanding penal colony must come to terms with the fact of internal colonisation at the institutional level of punishment and also at the level of political space. The struggle involves and always has involved people who are black and people who are not. The important thing is to relate the struggle for decolonisation and against recolonisation to the cultural politics of the people. Biko Agozino

Since first articulated in the classical eighteenth-century writings of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, the discipline of criminology has long been part of the cultural politics of the modern/colonial world system. Criminology’s blindness to and institutional complicity with the victimization wrought by that global system of power are also real aspects of its contradictory history. Consider the date 1791. In most conventional histories of criminology 1791 is noteworthy because in that year France enacted its Revolutionary Penal Code. The Penal Code put into practice Beccaria’s and Bentham’s Enlightenment-inspired ideas about the supposed rational choices that lead to crime as well as the legal mandate of ‘equal punishment’ for all found guilty of the same criminal acts. The date 1791 is also significant for another reason. It was in that year that Africans in Haiti, whose legal enslavement was permitted by French law, revolted against their European masters. As a profit- driven system of abject terror and capitalist economic exploitation, the institution of slavery systematically punished the innocent. But unlike the large number of individual criminal offenses targeted for punitive deterrence by France’s Revolutionary Penal Code, slavery’s punishment of the innocent was not declared a crime. The silence of the 1791 French Penal Code concerning slavery represents far more than a simple omission to include slavery as yet another form of punishable crime, alongside a long legislative list of offenses against individual citizens, private property, and the state. The failure to identify slavery as a crime also casts a troubling shadow

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on the Enlightenment imagination of modern criminology as such. Indeed, there is something hauntingly unreal about a scholarly discipline dedicated to the study of crime, the criminal and the criminal law that focuses almost exclusively upon the actions of law- breaking individuals, while turning a blind eye to the mass terrorism imposed upon innocent people by slavery, colonialism, and their continuing legacies. A key aspect of Biko Agozino’sCounter-Colonial Criminologyinvolves a challenge to contemporary criminology to ‘get real’ about this disturbing matter. To ‘get real’ about the relationship between the modern crimino- logical imagination and what Agozino calls the logic of ‘imperialist reason’ is to recognize that, for those most impacted by the violence of colonization in its past and present historical forms, the widespread punishment of the innocent is typically a matter of greater urgency than is the legalized punishment of offenders alone. For many conventional western criminologists this will prove a dis- comforting and difficult lesson. This is because the ‘imperial reason’ shaping dominant disciplinary approaches to the study of crime offers a wide range of professional rewards and personal pleasures for continuing to think about crime as if criminology itself is not partially complicit with the punishment of innocent persons and groups, whose only crime is to be subordinated by power. But for those committed to both scholarly objectivity and an impassioned struggle for peace, safety, and justice, Agozino’s important book will read like a long-awaited breath of fresh air. Counter-Colonial Criminologyis a transdisciplinary work of cutting- edge social theory, rigorous historical scholarship, and moving poetics. It provides a discerning genealogy of how the ‘cancer of imperialist logic’ has impacted the conceptual agenda, methods, and practical political implications of criminology as a modality of knowledge and power. In so doing, Agozino brings the voices of a wide variety of critical African and African Diaspora theorists, researchers, poets, novelists, playwrights, and musicians to bear upon the meaning of crime, as well as upon possible counter-colonial solutions for the crime problem. In this, the anti-imperialist scholarship of Walter Rodney, W.E.B. DuBois, Kwame Nkrumah, Ifi Amadiume, Angela Davis, Ama Ata Aidou, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Gani Fawehimi, Aimé Cæsaire and Patricia Hill Collins is mixed with the artistry of Ngugi wa Thiongo, Fatunde, Iyayi, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Peter Tosh.