Claire Spivakovsky, Racialized Correctional Governance: The Mutual Constructions of Race and Criminal Justice
| Author | David Brown |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513502438 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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Kate Shade
Samuel Merritt University, USA
Claire Spivakovsky, Racialized Correctional Governance: The Mutual Constructions of Race andCr iminal
Justice, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013; 188 pp. (including index): 9781409437512
This ambitious book begins with the issue of the over-representation of racialized
groups in the criminal justice system and argues convincingly that criminology
needs to deconstruct how it problematizes such over-representation. The author
goes on to argue that there have been two competing traditions, the first challen-
ging the notion of over-representation by arguing that high Indigenous criminal
justice system involvement merely reflects high Indigenous offending; the second
that over-representation is a symptom of the colonizing process, one of its effects.
Spivakovsky argues that this binary has become ‘repetitive’ and ‘dead-end’, and
has had the effect of ‘excising race from criminology’ (p. 3).
The project then, is to establish a different relationship between criminology and
racialized issues, which is to be achieved via a Foucauldian account of the ‘colli-
sion, negotiation, and transference that takes place through the mutual construc-
tions of race, criminal justice and criminology’. The concern is with ‘the middle’,
‘the places where these processes of construction intersect and are supported by
criminological discourse’ (p. 10).
It is a bold project and evaluation of how successful the author has been in
fulfilling her aim will depend on each reader. For this reader, the verdict is mixed.
The concern with ‘the middle’, a space which is not leveled by a neo-liberal jug-
gernaut, but is subject to negotiation, contestation and agency in its construction, is
refreshing. However the project specifications and plans, as unfolded, reveal in my
view excessive deference to the Foucauldian canon. Chapter 2 sets out ‘The Rules
of Engagement’ which rehearse Foucault’s various now familiar insights on the
operation of power, resistance, governmentality, tactics, strategy, the operation of
discourse, the body and so on, and fashion from them a set of prescriptions for
successfully opening up the field. These prescriptions are then used to explore ‘how
localized constructions of nationhood and racialized identity contribute to the
formation, transformation and orientation of criminal justice’ (p. 65).
The results, in the two detailed case studies of discourses and tools, used to
construct, govern and manage the racialized offender in the criminal justice system
and more specifically in the practice of corrections, in relation to Aboriginal
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