Book Review: Decolonising the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems
| Published date | 01 October 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639241229224 |
| Author | JOHN SCOTT |
| Date | 01 October 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: The Rule(s) of Law under HindutvaEdited by M. Sudhir Selvaraj, University of Bradford, UK and Raphael Susewind, London School of Economics, UKBook Reviews |
and timely challenge to traditional ideas that have dominated mental capacity law
to date. The monograph marks the start of a much-needed conversation, and one
which must continue if the CRPD is to realise its transformative potential in mental
capacity law.
AMBER PUGH
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
ORCID iD
Amber Pugh https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0101-3236
Notes
1. B v A Local Authority [2019] EWCA Civ 913 [63]-[4].
2. London Borough of Southwark v NP & Ors [2019] EWCOP 48 [12].
3. N v ACCG [2017] UKSC 22 [35].
ANA ALIVERTI, HENRIQUE CARVALHO, ANASTASIA CHAMBERLEN AND MÁXIMO SOZZO
(eds), Decolonising the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2023, pp. 416, ISBN 9780192899002, £110 (hbk).
Criminal justice abolitionism has a long history, with calls to abolish or radically modify cor-
rections and policing a feature of criminological debates in liberal democracies. The Me-Too
movement, Black Lives Matter and the COVID pandemic gave further impetus to reform
agendas anchored in left- and right-wing dissatisfaction with over-policing and under-
policing. Calls to abolish the police morphed into calls to abolish criminology (see
Saleh-Hanna et al. 2023), a discipline which had often collaborated closely with police
and had been active in articulating what the editors of this book call ‘the criminal question’.
Questioning the criminal question has been a feature of critical criminology, which has
been galvanised in the last two decades by work which has examined the relationship
between imperialism and colonialism and the criminal justice system and criminological
knowledge (see Aas 2012; Agozino 2003; Blagg and Anthony 2019; Brown 2014;
Carrington et al. 2018; Cuneen 2011; Godfrey and Dunstall 2005; Hogg and Brown
2018; Medina 2011). In my own country, Australia, Indigenous Australian scholars
have highlighted the role of criminology in colonial and neo-colonial processes (Porter
2018). There is also a degree to which we might question the status of criminology as
a discipline, being more a topic or question, as put here, structured around diverse discip-
linary approaches. In Australia and elsewhere it has emerged from disciplines such as
law, sociology, and psychology, all of which claim an older pedigree.
Have criminologists done enough to address the disgraceful state of Indigenous justice
in Australia and elsewhere globally? If we take the statistics at face value, regularly high-
lighted by criminologists, it would seem not (see Cunneen 2018). But, in its defence,
criminology in Australia and throughout much of the world is an emergent enterprise.
As the editors of this book note, ‘positivist’criminology has been around since the late
Book Reviews 829
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