Race, Racism, and Critical Criminology

RACE AND RACISM

OVERVIEW

  • Race is a social construct - historically product as part of the colonial process

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

Racism has three categories:

  1. Overt

  2. Institutional

  3. Systemic

THE ORIGINS OF RACE AND RACISM

  • Race is a social construct and a historical product of colonization 

  • Practices of race and racialization developed through a process of discover, dispossesion, and colonization (doctrine of discovery, used to justifiy the colonization of the Indigenous people)

  • Historic scientific racism

  • Racialization used on people, form of race based stereotyping  

Example: voting rights

  • Allowing some people to vote and not others     

COLONIALISM AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

  • Colonialism: process of European expansionism

  • Doctrine of Discovery: based on the concept terra nullius (newly belonged territories belongs to nobody)

  • European expansionism coincided with nationhood 

  • Scientific racism useful for colonialism

  • Role of RCMP: enforcing the Indian Act, expansion of railways in Canada, suppressing Indigenous culture, adavncing colonialing interest, helping with taking children to residential schools 

POLICE RACIAL PROFILING

  • use of race as the basis for profilling, determining who they are searching, arresting, and detaining

  • activity of selecting or examining a specific race  

  • often no differentiation between racialized minorities and kind of states that white people are homonogenous other

INTERSECTIONALITY

  • Race often understood in the context of a multi-dimensional structure of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability

  • States that these aspects are interconnected with each other and hard to be taken apart from one another to analyze seperate as they work with one another 

  • Some people are marginalized under multiple aspects and their experience differs from a person who is marginalized under just one

  • Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality: describes how race intersects with other institutional markers of identity such as (race, economic, class, gender, sexuality, etc.)

OVERT, INSTITUTIONAL, AND SYSTEMIC RACISM

  • Overt Racism: form of discriminatory racism expressed as a clear and ombigous type of racism, encounter between people where racial bias is experienced by one person directly such as racial slurs 

  • Institutional Racism: practice of racism where it can be understood as racism but not necessarly racists, bias exists because of rules or practices not an identity (racism without a racist person)

  • Systemic Racism: bias or difference as an affect of social structures, form of racial inequality as a form of education, incarciration, or health 

Office of the Correctional Officer: Using Critical Criminology Lens

  • critical criminology is hard to define, most of criminology is typically typical

  • assess how crime and criminological agencies is used as a social power 

  • branches away from the customary approaches to criminology

  • thinks more broadly about crime in society, considers the play of social structures instead of just the individual

EMERGENT ELEMENTS OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

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

  • abolitionist criminology: perspective that fundamentally critiques the criminal justice system, viewing it as a social problem itself that should be dismantled rather than reformed. It argues that the system is ineffective and inhumane, and instead advocates for the creation of community-based alternatives to address the root causes of crime, such as poverty and inequality

  • reform - making changes but keeping the overall purpose

  • abolition - focuses on the whole set of rules and thinks about how they can complete dismantle and approach things on a different way

  • Prison Abolitionists: focus on eliminating prisons and replacing them with systems that prevent harm, support rehabilitation, and address root causes of crime

  • Police Abolitionists: focus on eliminating traditional policing and replacing it with community-based safety systems, conflict resolution services, and crisis-response models

CONVICT CRIMINOLOGY

  • approach to criminology that provides a voice to those that have been in the justice system

  • focuses on the experiences of incarcerated individuals and emphasizes the need for reform within the justice system

RACE & CRIME TEXTBOOK CHAPTER

4.1 THE ORIGINS OF RACE AND RACISM 

Race is a social invention, also referred to as a social construct

  • historical product of Western European colonization and the systems of Trans-Atlantic slavery

  • this encounter created a conceptual and practical framework of Western European versus non-Western “others” and what the Europeans considered uncivilized new worlds

  • gave rise to flawed ideas about human variety

An important component of race and racism is the scholarly pursuit to hierarchise and categorize the physical differences and appearance of human beings

Blumenbach: concluded that humankind was split into five categories (Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopian, American, Malays)

  • his scientific method and theories have been discredited as psudo-science and scientic racism

Critical Perspective

  • rejects the idea that race is a natural category reflecting real human differences but rather understands race as a social construct used to artifically sort and divide humans

Race

  • has become a naturalized part of the way society understands and sorts people and deeply embedded in common sense and intituitions

  • important to criminology because it’s a powerful way people are identified, categorized, judged, and treated differently in modern societies

  • not only influences the actions of individuals, but also organizations and institutions who racialize the populations they encounter 

4.2 COLONIALISM AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE 

Colonialism: often refers to how European expansionism moved throughout the world beginning in the 15th century

Doctrine of Discovery: based on the legal concept of Terra Nullius (newly discovered territories belonged to nobody and could be claimed by occupation)

Nationhood: the idea that the world is divided into distinct nations made up of people with inherent ethnic, cultural, and even biological characteristics

Colonization: the implementation of a political, legal and economic system that is controlled through a foreign soverign authority 

  • canadian colonialism was based on resource extraction and trade

RCMP played a key institutional role in ensuring the cooperation and subjagation of Indigenous peoples 

  • enforced illegal pass system, suppressed cultural practices and helped distribute lands to settlers that were illegally acquired and in breach of Numbered Treaties

  • captured and returned children who ran away from residential schools

4.3 THE PRACTICES OF RACE IN COLONIALISM

Scholars argue that colonialism is a system of governance that relies upon institutional forms of racism that develop over three stages

  1. invents a distinction that is used to seperate themselves from the population they seek to control

  2. uses the idea that colonized people are different types of humans to justify its control over a territorial space

  3. understands its own civilization as superior to that of the people who are being colonialized

One way that racism became systematic is through law

  • The British system of criminal law was imposed through the empire to establish that various cultural practices were deemed barbaric and uncivilized

  • Banned Indigenous practices deemed uncivilized

  • Segregated First Nations peoples into reserves and prohibited their mobility with a “pass” system regulated by an Indian agent

  • Determined and restricted non-White Canadians’ status, rights, democratic representation, citizenship, and belonging

4.4 RACE AND RACIALIZATION TODAY

Race as an Action

We can understand “race” as a verb or an act that is “done” to someone or that subjects can be “racialized” 

  • assigns an individual based on observed or assumed somatic, phenotypical differerences, to a racial category that operates in a society

  • in this regard, race is a practice

People get racialized not because of desire, want or intention, but rather in spite of their own agency

  • people become racialized because race and racial identity is a strong component of contemporary society 

  • people are born into conditions not of their choosing, and race is one of those conditions

Practices that force participants and users of a survey/database to assign race to subjects constitute systemic racialization

  • they compel people to understand that society is racially divided and that people are members of distinct and seperate races

  • can become amplified when combined with other actions and practices

4.5 RACIAL PROFILING

Racial Profiling: the use of race by police and border security to select subjects for surveillance, detention, and/or arrest 

  • racialized people (especially Black people) are ticketed for vehicle violations, charged with possesion of controlled substances, brought to a police station, and given overnight stays in the police detention at rates way higher than white people 

Research regarding police and race is overwhelmingly focused on racial profiling and the use/abuse of it as a policing tool

    Tension exists between two polarities:

            1. scholarship that reveals the prescence and practice of bias in racial profiling

            2. scholarship that disputes racial profiling as a racist practice or imbedded within racial bias 

Problems to this Research:

  • Rarely differentiates between different racial minorities which suggests that non-White people are merely a single homogenous “other”

  • Doesn’t present a clear or consistent reference point regarding who or what constitutes a race or a racialized person 

4.6 INTERSECTIONALITY

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

Intersectionality: concept designed to show that these categories and their social effects are interlinked or interlocked in a way that makes them difficult to pull apart and analyze as seperate entities

  • Race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability are understood to act together to produce social effects such as social division, oppresion, and entitlement

Kimberle Crenshaw: used the concept of intersectionality to describe how race intersects with social and economic class, gender and sexual expression, nationality, and other institutional markers of identity

Intersectionality Research

  • Attempts to reveal that racial bias is not just a feeling or belief held by a single person

Through a lens of intersectionality, it’s possible to examine race and how it’s jointly expressed as economic wage disparity, housing disparty, education disparity, and/or as overt acts of violence and aggression

CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY TEXTBOOK CHAPTER

10.1 RISE OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

Critical criminology intitially evolved alongside theories loosely called “new deviancy” that proposed new theories of crime 

  • Significant part of a general move in social sciences away from the dominant posivistic paradigm of criminology

Critical Criminology

  • Normalized idea of crime and justice as well as its connection to crime control and punishment 

  • Ratner states that we should question what crime means in society and rhe government’s power to punish criminals

  • Attempt to investigate power relations and domination 

  • Involves research and investigation

  • Calls for activism and attempts to change things

Research

  • focuses on the bigger picture or social structures instead of individual determinants of people’s behaviour

10.2 MARX + BASIS OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

Marx’s writings were concerned with the rise of social institutions during the industrialization which included

  • The development of criminal law

  • The power of police and prisons

  • The processes of criminilization

Marx rejected the idea that societies operate based on a consensus

  • Suggests that societies are full of conflict, which is often reflected in, and stems from the social relationships involved in producing the things we need to survive such as food and shelter

Marx’s Beliefs

  • Argues that there’s nothing natural about the creation of private property, the extraction of resources from the land, or the extraction of value from those resources

  • Argues that our capitalist order is a political and exonomic one formed through various attempts at social control of these process of private property, extraction and value

Bloody Legislation: laws passed by the state apparatus in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Commonwealth countries that do two things 

  1. Enable the creation of private property, enabling the privatization of wealth, value, resources and lans (thereby creating a powerful capitalist class)

  2. Used against the working class and against the lumpenproletariat (lower class people not interested in the revolution) who cannot work or choose not to work

            - These laws force people to work in the capitalist mode of production in factories. 

            - If people choose not to work, bloody legislation is applied to them

Criminal law, policce, and prisons from a Marxist perspective, exist to control the population, force people to work, and to prevent people from collectivizing (or equally sharing) land, resources, and wealth

William Chambliss

  • Drew on Marx’s ideas and concluded that these laws were created to force people to work in factories and other places, criminalizing those who did not

  • These laws were pivotal in capital expansion and he noted how different categories of the “criminal” were created as capitalism expanded 

  • Defined crime as “conduct that is defines and controlled by agents of the dominant economic class in a politically organized society to benefit capitalism” 

Lous Althusser

  • Repressive State Apparatuses: bodies granted the legal right to use physical force to control the masses

            - Includes the military, police, judiciary, and the prison system 

Instrumental Marxist

  • continues the understanding put forward by Marx, that the state apparatus and criminal law exists as a direct result of capitalism to uphold capitalism and the capitalist mode of production

Structural Marxist

  • argues that the government are somewhat autonomous and are not simply installed by the owning class 

  • agree that law works to ensure capitalist accumulation and to maintain conditions where the generation of wealth is possile

  • focus less on the coercive nature of the law alone and more on the ideological function of the law

Contemporary Marxist

  • argue ideoligies are necessary to support and legitimate actions of the state to enfore definitions of crime in law, policing, and other corrections

10.3 POST-STRUCTURALISM: FOUCAULT AND CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY 

Foucault

  • reconsidered how power works

  • has been called post-structuralist

  • argued that by simply focusing on power as equal to the law creates a kind of “sterilizing political consequence”

  • views power via language and how we think and know about things (how power works between people, not on people)

  • extends or broadens the analysis of power away from economic re/opression into thinking about power existing flowing/circulating between people and groups or institutions

Phases of Foucauldian Thought

  1. Archaelogial Phase

  2. Genealogial Phase

  3. Phase of Ethics

            Archaelogical Phase

  • Interested in the emergence of discourse and how they are translated into techniques or methods of power

  • Discourse: the general domain of all statements and classifications about some topic or issue

  • Understands law as a discourse or a mechanism for categorizing and classifying people

  • Uses developments in the human and natural sciences

            Genealogical Phase

  • Interested in not only the tecniques of classificaion, but also how they turn into different mechanisms of disciple and normalization

  • Focuses on a detailed history of how punishment changes from the body of the condemned (hanging, beheading) to the soul of the convicted (therapy, reflection, confinement, etc.) 

  • There are power relations that do not stem from law or the state apparatus, but are located in individual relationships (guard/prisoner, lawyer/accused)

            Phase of Ethics

  • Shifts to self-control or self-disciple and how individuals enage in the “care of self” or makes them up as people or what he called an “ethical self”

  • Focused on how we make ourselves good students, good workers, good athletes, good partnes, etc. 

  • Interested in how people governed themself in a free society, how we make ourselves into members of society, and how we control our own behaviour 

David Garland

  • Linked Foucault’s idea to a history of crime control policies in the US and Britain between 1970 and 2000

  • Interested in how the penal welfare state that was designed to assess, diagnose, and treat offenders changed into a third sector of crime control characterized by the rise of prevention and security apparatuses

  • Details how the system moved from a system of punishment and rehabilitative justice to one of safety and risk management