Pan-African Issues in Crime and Justice

Biko Agozino, Anita Kalunta-Crumpton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminology assumes the position of an established discipline, yet its influence is limited by its primary focus on the West for both theoretical and empirical substance. But the growing interest in comparative criminology now means that countries compare notes, thereby broadening the parameters of criminology. Still relatively ignored in the literature, however, are issues of crime and justice as they affect people of African descent around the globe. Drawing upon materials from countries in Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, and Europe, this stimulating book reflects on the experiences of people of African descent to offer a convergence of criminologies in and outside the West. Simultaneously, it acknowledges Western criminology as a significant angle from which to comprehend crime and justice as they are conceptualized outside the West. The volume also investigates whether Western criminological accounts are relevant to the comprehension of crime, criminality and systems of justice in Africa, the Caribbean and South America.

1
Criminology and Orientalism

ANITA KALUNTA-CRUMPTON

Introduction

Mainstream criminological knowledge as we know it is reflective of a western view of the social world. It represents a hegemonic position of western conceptualisation of crime, criminality and criminal justice. What the dominant criminological enterprise is slow to represent is a process of doing criminology from the standpoint of ‘others’ outside the West. For one, the voice of Africa and Africans is a long way short of being embraced into the centre of the defining process of western criminology, which fundamentally assumes a divide between the definer and the defined. These two categories mirror firstly, the dominant position of those who define as represented in the western perspective and secondly, the subordinate position of those (that is, non-westerners) who are recipients of definitions popularly pursued in criminological inquiry. It is an arrangement that builds on concepts of race and which transcends domestic boundaries to reach global parameters. Within the domestic context, this divide cannot manifest itself any better than in the ways in which race has been dissected within academic analyses of crime. In North America and Western Europe for example, ‘race’, a term inundated with negative meanings, is commonly utilised to apply to non-whites. More revealing of this racial demarcation is the position of people of African descent as often the subject of inquiry in debates about crime. For instance, to study race and crime is to fundamentally explore such issues as the patterns and causes of black peoples’ engagement in criminal acts; to study race in law enforcement is to primarily parade black people’s encounters with agencies of the criminal justice system. Regardless of any differences in objectives embraced in such debates, whether it purports to establish a conservative or a radical or a liberal stance, the race-specific approach normally features the existence of a problem worth examining and defining. Addressing race therefore is particularly about analysing, defining and understanding the ‘problematic’ of blackness.

As already noted, the influential place of hegemony in criminological approach to studying black people is not confined to scenarios in western societies but can also be transposed onto situations outside the West, that is in ‘black’ societies across the globe (Cain, 2000). This of course is not to claim that criminology holds much positive interest in pan-African issues outside the West. Western criminological interest in ‘black’ societies in Africa and the Caribbean, for instance, is very limited perhaps due to a belief that these societies have nothing worthwhile to contribute to international comparative criminological research. Such belief could naturally stem from a historical backdrop of white hegemony through which western criminology has itself tended to adopt an absolutist position in defining pan-African issues against western perspectives and standards. As such, any conceptions that black societies have nothing useful to offer criminology can seem to coincide with centuries of ethnocentric viewpoints, which have defined and still define various facets of ‘blackness’ as inferior to the superior whiteness of the West. It is from this standpoint that we can relate to criminological neglect of, and/or ‘interest’, in people of African descent around the world.

This chapter firstly presents a review, by no means exhaustive account, of criminology’s relationship with issues relating to people of African descent. It draws attention to the place of race in the criminological journey from the classical period to contemporary times, and in doing so, demonstrates the intersection of theory and practice. And as a case study, it reviews the workings of the UK (United Kingdom) criminal justice system to exemplify the practical significance of criminology vis-à-vis race. Secondly, the chapter searches for a criminology, which exists outside the dominant western framework, and concludes by calling for a criminological recognition of pan-African concerns, particularly from the point of view of people of African descent around the globe.

Understanding Crime and Justice

Criminology developed principally out of western culture and therefore it is reflective of western perspectives. From classical to postclassical criminologies, the place of people of African descent in the range of criminological endeavours has varied in significance. Classical perspectives and their core notions of social contract, utility and rationality held principles that displayed no direct application to race. Explicit questions of race started to arise in the 19th century with the development of positivist criminology and its scientific approach to the study of criminal behaviour. Under this criminological stance, popularly associated with the Italian school founded by Cesare Lombroso, it was claimed that criminal behaviour was biologically determined (Lombroso, 1876; Ferri, 1895). By linking crime to certain physical characteristics, Lombroso concluded that criminals were genetic throwbacks to more primitive forms of human species, which he referred to as atavistic. This conclusion drew upon his study of criminals in which he observed that criminals shared many anatomical similarities with savages and non-whites. Examples of those physical similarities were voluminous ears, receding forehead, fleshy lips, darker skin colour, small skull, and thicker and curly hair. Lombroso’s ideas were widely received and influential. As Garland (1985) observed, positivist criminology ‘developed from the idiosyncratic concerns of a few individuals into a programme of investigation and social action which attracted support throughout Europe and North America’ (cited in Roshier, 1989, p.20).

The positivist theories that differentiated the ‘criminal type’ from the ‘noncriminal type’ were premised on assumptions of superior and inferior races representing white and non-white races respectively. For one, the principles of biological positivism were centrally beneficial to Europe’s move towards the colonisation of the supposed inferior non-white territories following the end of the slave trade in the 19th century. Slavery itself had thrived on notions of white racial superiority articulated by European philosophers of ‘The Age of Reason’ (Eze, 1997). The belief that intelligence, reason and civilisation can only be found among the white race justified the subjection of Africans to hostile and savage slave labour since as was perceived, their stupidity, lack of intelligence and indolence meant that they were not suited for anything requiring the application of reason (Walvin, 1971, 1973; Fryer, 1984). Biological positivism was greatly influenced by biological evolutionary theories upheld by theorists such as Charles Darwin. Darwin’s (1859) On the Origin of Species and his concepts of natural selection and the survival of the fittest not only implied a natural divide between superior and inferior races. It also denounced contact between the two for fear of contamination of the former by the latter. For the ‘superior’ race to therefore maintain its purity and superiority, it must resist any forms of threat of racial degeneration. Those assumptions were utilised to justify the need for colonialism and the subordination of the ‘lower’ races in Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere; they were linked to the idea of trusteeship, which also underlined the philosophies of colonial domination by the ‘superior’ race.

Within western nations in North America, Europe and elsewhere, the establishment of the eugenics movement founded by Francis Galton towards the latter part of the 19th century (Galton, 1869; Goring, 1913) was to pave the way for the practical implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The fundamental mission of the eugenics movement to purify the genetic stock of the white race had from the late 19th century entailed formulating ways of causing the extinction of social categories, defined as socially unfit, undesirable and of low intelligence, through selective breeding. Essentially this involved preventing those ‘inferior’ categories from reproducing as exemplified in the programme of involuntary sterilisation practised in southern states of the United States (US). Among those included in the eugenicists’ list were black people (Miller, 1997). Incidentally, the eugenics movement gained a great deal of its strength from the growing interest in the relationship between crime and intelligence amongst North American and European psychologists. Works on intelligence testing popularly claimed that intelligence was not only biological and fixed but was also related to criminality whether directly or indirectly (Goddard, 1912, 1914; Jensen, 1969; Eysenck, 1971; Hirschi and Hindelang, 1977; Wilson and Hermstein, 1985).

The implications of these observations for race have been more obvious than not. Psychologists have used IQ scores to uphold the view that white Americans have by far more superior intelligence than their African-American counterparts. And this difference in intelligence is largely attributed to genetic differences between the two groups. Relatedly, differences in crime rates between African-Americans and European-Americans have attracted explanations within this intelligence-biology framework, with the overall argument linking the perceived low IQ among African-Americans to the recorded higher crime rate for this racial group (Gordon, 1976; Hirschi and Hindelang, 1977). Despite the fact that the IQ-race-crime studies stood to invite an array of controversial debates and criticisms (Kamin, 1977), including evidence of methodological shortcomings such as the lack of clarity and consensus as to what IQ scoring measures, and the influence of cultural bias on IQ tests, it is a line of thought that has resurfaced in recent years. Hermstein and Murray’s (1994) book, The Bell Curve is a recent reminder of the IQ controversy. The authors reiterated that intelligence is largely a biological factor; that differences in IQ scores coincide with differences in class and racial origins; and that crime and delinquency are conversant with low IQ.

Both Lombrosian biological positivism and its offshoot, psychological positivism, locate the causes of crime in the individual. Notwithstanding the sensitive nature of these theories, their philosophies of individualising crime continue to surface. Explicitly and implicitly, race continues to be a part of this process of understanding criminal behaviour. Such racial influence is further illustrated in the conservative theory of the underclass, another major individualistic approach to crime (Murray, 1984, 1990). Here, the underclass are identified by their ‘culture of poverty’ caused because they possess certain ‘unconventional’ cultural features (that of poverty), which are passed on from one generation to another, and which prevent them from taking advantage of available opportunities to escape poverty. Such cultural features, which include above all illegitimacy and single-parenthood, unemployment and welfare-dependency, and crime, are commonly found amongst the lower-class sections of society. In the United States, these are known to be largely composed of African-Americans and Hispanics; in Britain, the ‘emerging underclass’ can include black communities (Murray, 1996).

Alongside psychological explanations of crime, Lombroso’s legacy of positivism also evolved into various social theoretical strands that have overtly or covertly manifested the race ingredient in our understanding of crime and criminality. The Chicago School’s influential social disorganisation theory demonstrates a strong relationship between crime and poorer areas of society. Referred to as the zones in transition, those ‘crimogenic areas’, often occupied by immigrant populations including high numbers of African-Americans, were characterised by low levels of social integration, high levels of socio-economic deprivation and relatedly high rates of crime (Shaw, 1929; Shaw and McKay, 1942). Merton’s (1938) anomie and strain theory, also influential, focused on the crime-producing effects of social structural factors. His central argument sees crime as a product of problems of strain that arise out of a disjunction between culturally defined goals and the legitimate means of achieving those goals. Herein, the lower class is clearly predicted to be more likely to resort to crime as a response to situations of anomie and strain caused by the contradiction between the two elements. This prediction is even more apparent for black and other visible minority ethnic communities given their higher levels of socio-economic deprivation across nations in North America and Europe, for example (Sampson and Wilson, 1995; Massey and Denton; 1993; Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, 2000; Brown, 1984; Penal Affairs Consortium, 1996).

Notwithstanding the notable shift of positivist accounts of criminal behaviour from the 19th century individualistic theories to the 20th sociological perspectives, race has remained a significant feature, particularly in its implicit connection to the class basis for understanding criminality. Within the series of attack on sociological positivism that emerged in the middle of the 20th century and other subsequent criminological advances that were to follow, the impact of race has been felt. Like the practical illustration of the individualistic approaches instanced in the eugenics movement, the sociological pursuits and their offshoots have also had pract...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Criminology and Orientalism
• 2 Human Rights, Gender and Traditional Practices: The Trokosi System in West Africa
• 3 Crime, Justice and Social Control in Egypt
• 4 Crime, Social Change and Social Control in Namibia: An Exploratory Study of Namibian Prisons
• 5 Criminal Fraud and Developing Countries
• 6 Transnational Crimes: The Case of Advanced Fee Fraud in Nigeria
• 7 Women Faced with Violence: A View on Skin Colour in Brazil
• 8 Working from the Inside/Out: Drama as Activism in Westville Female Prison
• 9 Women and (African) Indigenous Justice Systems
• 10 Crossing the Wrong Boundaries: The Dilemma of Women’s Drug Trade Participation in Jamaica
• 11 Gunboat Criminology and the Colonization of Africa
• 12 Reparative Justice: A Pan-African Criminology Primer
• Index