Crim 101 Critical Criminology...

Race and Racism: an overview

•   race is a social construct-historically produced as part of the colonial process

• racism is an act produced in a systematic manner, manifesting in the unequal treatment of people by social-legal and historical structures, as well as institutions

• racism has three categories: overt, institutional and systemic

The origins of race and racism

• race is a social construct & a historical product of colonization

• practices of race and racialization developed through a process of discovery, dispossession and colonization

• Historical scientific racism

Colonialism and criminal justice 

• Colonialism

  • process of European expansionism

  • doctrine of discovery based on the concept terra nullius

  • European expansionism coincided with nationhood

  • scientific racism useful for colonialism

  • Role of RCMP

Intersectionality

• race often understood in the context of a multi-dimensional structure of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability

•   Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality

overt, institutional and systemic racism

• overt Racism

  • A blatant and explicit form of racial discrimination and prejudice that involves intentional, visual and direct actions or remarks against a racial minority individual or group

• Institutional Racism

  • Discrimination or unequal treatment on the basis of membership of a particular ethnic group arising from systems structures or exceptions that have become established within an institution or organization

• Systemic Racism

  • The embedded patterns of policies practises and cultural norms that create and maintain racial inequalities

Emergent elements of critical criminology

• Theoretically, all abolitionists draw ideas from both Marxist and Foucauldian concepts on criminal justice systems

  • prison abolitionists

    • a movement or group that seeks to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system and replace them with systems of rehab rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization

Convict criminology

A subfield of criminology that includes the firsthand experiences of incarcerated and formally incarcerated people in the study of crime and justice