CRCJ 2200 Midterm

Critical criminology

Studies how social, political, economic, racial, and colonial power shapes crime definitions and punishment rather than treating crime simply as individual deviance.

Criminalization

The process of defining and regulating conduct or groups as criminal or punishable, including previously tolerated everyday practices.

Criminal legal system versus criminal justice system

Critical scholars often say criminal legal system to avoid assuming that the institutions applying criminal law necessarily produce justice.

Merry (1998) central argument

Criminalization of everyday life redefines customary practices as offenses against the state and often serves colonial and capitalist control.

Merry's three sites of criminalization

Legal definition and lawmaking; enforcement through police and courts; and popular consciousness concerning whether new rules appear legitimate.

Legal definition in Merry's framework

How laws and officials redefine ordinary conduct as unlawful or threatening.

Enforcement in Merry's framework

How police, prosecutors, judges, and other officials implement laws through arrests, charges, convictions, and punishment.

Popular consciousness in Merry's framework

How society accepts, contests, or rejects newly criminalized conduct and the state's account of it.

Law and everyday life as mutually constitutive

Law shapes ordinary relationships and identities while social norms and disputes also shape laws.

Trouble cases

Conflicts that make law visible because parties openly bring disputes into the legal system; Merry argues ordinary situations also show law's influence.

Criminalization under colonial capitalism

Officials used criminal law to impose wage work, labor discipline, punctuality, sobriety, and control over movement and cultural practices.

Masters and Servants laws

Colonial labor laws that criminalized breaches of employment obligations and compelled subordinate workers to fulfill contracts.

Historical vagrancy law and labor discipline

Laws punished those without recognized jobs or fixed housing and pressured displaced people into wage labor.

Colonial civilizing mission

A justification for controlling colonized people's ceremonies, families, languages, labor, and social lives by labeling them uncivilized.

Indian Act restrictions on Indigenous ceremony

Canadian colonial law banned practices including potlatch and Sun Dance, using criminalization to suppress Indigenous governance and culture.

Potlatch bans: broader significance

By portraying complex redistribution and governance ceremonies as disorderly, authorities made colonial assimilation appear lawful and necessary.

Potlatch ban repeal

The Canadian potlatch prohibition was repealed in 1951; Indigenous participation and resistance had challenged its legitimacy.

Racialization

The social and historical process of assigning racial meanings and hierarchies to groups and practices through power, institutions, and representation.

Murdocca (2014) central argument

Race is constructed through social, historical, political, and legal processes; representations of racial danger support regulation and criminalization.

Why race is not a biological explanation in critical criminology

Racial categories and their meanings change across time and societies and are produced through social power, not fixed natural differences.

Representation and regulation

Institutions and media describe groups as dangerous or disorderly, helping justify laws and enforcement targeting them.

Categorization

Sorting people and practices into social groups that can acquire unequal moral or legal meanings.

Social construction

The process by which social institutions, language, media, and historical power make particular meanings appear natural or obvious.

Binary opposition in racialization

A paired hierarchy such as civilized/savage or human/subhuman that represents a dominant group as superior to another.

Fanon's contribution

Colonial power constructs hierarchies between colonizer and colonized, including human/subhuman and civilized/barbarian divisions.

Edward Said and Orientalism

Dominant Western representations construct colonized or non-Western populations as exotic, backward, or governable others.

Stuart Hall and the mugging moral panic

British media and authorities framed young Black men as an emerging mugging threat, legitimating expanded policing and reproducing racialized arrest statistics.

Stanley Cohen and folk devils

Groups symbolically portrayed as threats to social order during moral panics.

Gramsci's hegemony

Dominance maintained partly by securing public consent through institutions, ideology, and common sense rather than force alone.

Crenshaw's intersectionality

Race, gender, class, and other systems of power intersect, so a person's experiences cannot be fully explained by one category alone.

Criminalization feedback loop

Racialized representation produces fear; fear prompts targeted enforcement; enforcement generates arrest figures; those figures appear to validate the stereotype.

Ottawa drug possession disparity in the guide

Black residents were approximately 8% of Ottawa's population but approximately 18% of simple drug-possession arrests in the analyzed period.

What Ottawa drug arrest disparities do and do not show

They show disproportionate enforcement outcomes but do not alone establish higher rates of drug use or prove a particular officer acted with bias.

Conventional law-and-order frame

Treats crime laws as broadly neutral responses to harm and arrest numbers as measurements of offender behavior.

Critical race frame

Asks who defines offenses, where police patrol, whose behavior is scrutinized, and how apparently neutral law produces unequal outcomes.

Why criminalization is not the same as racialization

Criminalization makes behavior or people subject to sanction; racialization supplies unequal racial meanings that can guide who becomes targeted.

E. P. Thompson and labor discipline

The transition to industrial capitalism criminalized or stigmatized irregular work routines, festivities, and subsistence practices to encourage factory labor.

Colonial Zanzibar vagrancy case

After abolition, authorities used vagrancy and labor rules to push freed people toward plantation work; workers resisted compulsory routines.

Hawaiian colonial court transformation

Imported legal institutions increasingly regulated Indigenous sexuality and later plantation labor, showing changing priorities in colonial criminalization.

Selective protection under colonial law

Authorities often punished subordinated people for conduct while ignoring violence against them, revealing unequal definitions of deserving protection.

Criminalization of resistance

Use of criminal law, injunctions, policing, or administrative sanctions to suppress anti-colonial, environmental, labor, or political dissent.

Public-order perspective on protest

Emphasizes property rights, contractual stability, predictable investment, public access, and controlling disruption.

Critical perspective on protest criminalization

Asks how visible dissent is punished while powerful actors causing large-scale harms are protected or licensed.

Civil injunction

A court order restricting conduct; when used against land defenders it can enable arrests and policing of a jurisdictional dispute.

Procedural legality versus substantive legitimacy

A court order may follow state legal procedure while its moral or political legitimacy is challenged because it overrides Indigenous jurisdiction.

Corntassel's view of land defense

Indigenous land defense exercises inherent responsibilities and legal authority, not merely an ordinary right to protest.

Wet'suwet'en Coastal GasLink conflict

Hereditary leaders opposed pipeline construction across unceded territory while courts granted injunctions enforced by the RCMP.

Wet'suwet'en hereditary leadership versus elected band councils

Hereditary systems assert authority over ancestral territory; Indian Act band councils administer reserve governance under federal law.

Wet'suwet'en five clans

Hereditary chiefs representing five clans asserted responsibilities across traditional territory in the Coastal GasLink dispute.

Role of the RCMP C-IRG

The Community-Industry Response Group enforced pipeline-related injunctions through policing, surveillance, and arrests.

Why Wet'suwet'en land defense is a jurisdictional conflict

It involves competing claims about which legal order has authority over unceded land, not merely whether individuals may demonstrate.

Land Back as more than land title

It seeks restoration of Indigenous jurisdiction, land-based responsibilities, governance, and ongoing relationships rather than only private-property transfer.

Mathiesen (2024) case

Just Stop Oil activists were imprisoned in 2024 after throwing soup at van Gogh's Sunflowers in 2022; protective glass spared the painting but the frame was damaged.

Sunflowers case: damage distinction

The van Gogh painting was protected by glass; the surrounding frame suffered damage estimated in the study guide at about £10,000.

Sunflowers case: sentences

The study guide reports custodial sentences of two years and twenty months for the activists.

Proportionality question in environmental protest

Whether punishment is proportionate to actual damage and whether harsh sentencing also deters political opposition.

Why climate civil disobedience differs from Indigenous land defense

Climate protesters typically invoke democratic dissent; Indigenous land defenders assert distinct inherent sovereignty and legal jurisdiction.

State-corporate protection critique

Law may criminalize disruptive protest yet authorize or weakly punish corporate activities causing widespread ecological harm.

Legality versus harm

Conduct can be criminalized despite comparatively minor damage while extensive environmentally harmful activity remains legally permitted.

Limits of blanket claims about protest

Critical analysis still considers the actual conduct, competing legal rights, and statutory rules rather than assuming all resistance is automatically legal.

Safer supply

Providing substances of known composition and potency to people at risk of overdose so they can avoid an unpredictable and toxic unregulated drug market.

Safer supply versus decriminalization

Safer supply provides known substances; decriminalization removes criminal penalties for possession or use without necessarily providing a safer alternative.

Decriminalization versus legalization and regulation

Decriminalization removes criminal punishment for specified conduct; legal regulation establishes legal production, quality standards, distribution, and oversight.

Safer supply versus supervised consumption

Safer supply changes the source and quality of drugs; supervised consumption provides monitored spaces for using substances already obtained.

Medical safer supply model

Prescribers provide pharmaceutical alternatives, such as hydromorphone, through clinical services.

Nonmedical safer supply model

Peer-led or community-based organizations supply tested substances outside a standard prescription relationship.

Harm reduction

Policies and services intended to reduce drug-related illness, injury, and death without requiring abstinence as a condition of support.

Civil Society Platform: Decriminalization Done Right

Calls for a human-rights-based approach to drugs with removal of punitive sanctions, voluntary care, housing, harm reduction, and safer supply.

Net widening in drug policy

Replacing criminal penalties with extensive fines, monitoring, administrative sanctions, or other controls that continue to punish drug users.

Nicole Mannoe and Pivot Legal Society (2023)

Critique forced addiction treatment as carceral care that undermines consent, autonomy, and may increase post-release overdose vulnerability.

Carceral care

Coercive healthcare organized around involuntary confinement, surveillance, and state control rather than meaningful patient choice.

Involuntary addiction treatment

Compulsory detention or treatment imposed without a person's informed voluntary consent.

Why post-discharge overdose risk matters

Forced abstinence may lower tolerance, making a return to unpredictable street drugs especially dangerous.

Consent and representative decision making in involuntary care

Pivot raises concern that legal frameworks can strip individuals of bodily autonomy and control over who decides on their behalf.

Bahji et al. (2023) research question

Whether involuntary substance-use-disorder treatment has better outcomes than voluntary treatment, evaluated through a systematic review.

Bahji et al. review size

The study guide describes 42 studies covering a combined 354,420 participants.

Bahji et al. direct comparisons

Among 22 studies directly comparing voluntary and involuntary treatment, 7 favored involuntary treatment, 10 reported worse outcomes, and 5 found no significant difference.

Bahji et al. overall conclusion

Evidence is heterogeneous and methodologically limited; it cannot conclusively establish that involuntary treatment works or fails across contexts.

Why Bahji et al. should not be used to evaluate safer supply

Their review assesses involuntary substance-use treatment, not the effectiveness of safer-supply programs.

Pivot versus Bahji evidence type

Pivot advances a normative human-rights and legal critique; Bahji et al. synthesize available empirical treatment studies and acknowledge their limitations.

DULF Compassion Club

Vancouver community-run drug-checking and non-prescriber supply initiative that tested and distributed measured doses to roughly 40 enrolled members.

DULF testing methods

Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometry and immunoassay test strips were used to assess drug contents.

DULF reported overdose outcome

The study guide states that no fatal overdoses occurred among active members during its reported operation; this does not prove population-wide causal effectiveness.

DULF policing response

Police raided the Vancouver program and organizers faced Controlled Drugs and Substances Act charges in late 2023.

Ontario hydromorphone study sample

The guide cites assessments involving 52 clients and 21 service providers.

Ontario safer supply reported changes

Clients described reduced street fentanyl use, fewer injection-related problems, some movement toward oral use, and improved stability.

Why safer supply qualitative evidence has limits

Client experiences illuminate plausible benefits but do not by themselves establish causal effects across all populations.

BC decriminalization pilot timing

The study guide covers British Columbia's 2023–2026 exemption from federal drug possession law.

BC pilot quantity threshold

A cumulative 2.5 grams for specified substances including opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, and MDMA under a section 56(1) exemption.

Critiques of BC decriminalization

Arbitrary quantity thresholds, remaining police powers, continued toxic supply, and lack of guaranteed safer-supply access.

Drug policy prohibition and abstinence frame

Prioritizes drug suppression, abstinence, prevention of diversion, and sometimes compulsory institutional care.

Public health and bodily autonomy frame

Treats toxic drug deaths as a public-health and rights problem best addressed through reliable supply, voluntary supports, and nonpunitive interventions.

Drug diversion concern

The possibility that prescribed substances will be sold or redistributed outside their intended program, raised by critics of safer supply.

Three types of safer-supply evidence

Program reports and observational counts, qualitative interviews, and more rigorous comparative outcomes research have different limits and strengths.

Why the toxic drug supply matters

Unknown substances and changing potency increase poisoning risk independent of an individual's intention to use a drug.

Indigenous resurgence

Collective renewal and daily practice of Indigenous law, language, governance, kinship, and land relationships outside reliance on settler-state recognition.

Corntassel's central argument

Land Back and community resurgence require practicing Indigenous law and responsibilities on Indigenous lands, not merely seeking state recognition.

Cunneen and Tauri (2016) central argument

Mainstream criminology often reproduces colonial state perspectives; Indigenous criminology centers dispossession, state harm, and Indigenous-defined justice.

Mainstream criminology's deficit framing

Treating Indigenous over-incarceration as a problem of individual behavior while neglecting dispossession and colonial legal structures.

Indigenous criminology's reframed question

How do colonial criminal legal institutions produce displacement, regulate Indigenous peoples, and suppress sovereign Indigenous legal orders?