Decolonizing the criminal question
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Author | Anastasia Chamberlen,Henrique Carvalho,Ana Aliverti,Máximo Sozzo |
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745211020585 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
Review Essay
Decolonizing the
criminal question
Ana Aliverti , Henrique Carvalho and
Anastasia Chamberlen
University of Warwick, UK
Ma
´ximo Sozzo
Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina
Abstract
In the last years there has been a growing effort from different theoretical perspectives to
interrogate critically the impact of colonialism in the past and present of institutions and
practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts, as well as in the
production of knowledge in the criminological field. In this feature piece we examine
this debate. We offer a critical account of key themes and problems that emerge from
the intimate relationship between colonialism and punishment that directly challenge the
persistent neglect of these dimensions in mainstream criminological scholarship. We aim to
foreground the relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. We highlight that
decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the cultural, social and political
mechanisms informing contemporary punishment. They are still very much part of criminal
justice practice and are thus also central to criminological knowledge productions.
Keywords
criminal question, decolonization, globalization, punishment
Introduction
There has never been a more appropriate occasion for questioning the colonial
dimensions of criminal justice institutions and of the ways we have studied them.
We are at a moment in our geopolitical landscape where, on the one hand, ideas of
Corresponding author:
Ana Aliverti, School of Law, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, CV4 7AL, Coventry, UK.
Email: a.aliverti@warwick.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(3) 297–316
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14624745211020585
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sovereignty, history and race relations have sought to hold onto and politically
utilize these enduring imperial and colonial rationales, and on the other hand, we
are seeing, finally, an effort to scrutinize and comprehensively challenge these
rationales. Questions of empire and coloniality have been especially influential
in activist and scholarly challenges to the contemporary structures and practices
of our criminal justice institutions and these efforts implore us to re-examine what
are conceived as stable concepts in ‘criminology’, as a broad, complex and poly-
valent field (Sozzo, 2021; Sparks, 2021; Sparks and Loader, 2011), including ‘pun-
ishment and society studies’ (Garland, 2018; Simon and Sparks, 2013).
In the last years there has been a growing effort from different theoretical perspec-
tives to interrogate critically the impact of colonialism in the past and present of
institutions and practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts,
as well as in the production of knowledge in the criminological field. These recent
efforts are related to important precedents in the critical criminologies of the 1980s,
both in Europe and Latin America (Beirne, 1983; Cohen, 1982; Del Olmo, 1981, 1990;
Sumner, 1982; Zaffaroni, 1988, 1989). In the last two decades we have witnessed
groundbreaking, detailed historical work on the relationship between imperialism,
criminology, criminal law and punishment (Agozino, 2003; Brown, 2001, 2014, 2015;
Godfrey and Dunstall, 2005; Hogg and Brown, 2018; Mukherjee, 2003) as well as an
increasing interest in drawing out the effects of colonialism on the contemporary archi-
tecture of crime and punishment on the one hand and on criminological knowledge on
the other, including appeals to build “counter-colonial”, “postcolonial” , “decolonial”
and “southern” perspectives (Aas, 2012; Agozino, 2003, 2004, 2010, 2018; Blagg, 2008;
Blagg and Thalia, 2019; Brown, 2017, 2018; Cain, 2000; Carrington et al., 2016, 2018,
2019; Cunnen, 2011, 2018a, 2018b; Cunnen and Tauri, 2017; Fonseca, 2018a, 2018b;
Medina, 2011; Moosavi, 2019; Rodriguez Goyes, 2018; Travers, 2019; Zaffaroni and
Codino, 2015). This work has sparked a crucial contemporary debate.
In this feature piece we examine this debate. We offer a critical account of key
themes and problems that emerge from the intimate relationship between colonial-
ism and punishment that directly challenge the persistent neglect of these dimen-
sions in mainstream criminological scholarship. We aim to foreground the
relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. We highlight that
formal processes of decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the
cultural, social and political mechanisms informing contemporary punishment.
They are still very much part of criminal justice practice and are thus also central
to criminological knowledge production.
To better reflect the standpoint pursued here, we use the idea of ‘the criminal
question’, a terminology that is frequently employed by Southern European and
Latin American scholars but also one that had some recent diffusion in English-
speaking debates (see for example Melossi et al., 2011; Pitch, 1995; Sparks and
Loader, 2011). As Tamar Pitch pointed out:
To study the criminal question is different from studying crime. It means that crime is
not considered independently from the procedures by which it is defined, the
298 Punishment & Society 23(3)
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