Editorial
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618760117 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618760117
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(1) 3
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618760117
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Editorial
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Mark Brown has won the 2017 Theoretical
Criminology best article prize for his article ‘Postcolonial Penality: Liberty and
Repression in the Shadow of Independence, India c. 1947’. Reviewers commended the
piece as one of the best theoretical pieces on penal power and colonial rule. The article
addresses a ‘criminological blind spot’ missed in criminology’s ‘fetishization of the
domestic now’. This ‘blind spot’ is postcolonial penality. Brown questions the assump-
tion that the end of colonialism and the start of independence necessarily entailed an
easing of penality. Instead, his article investigates the continuities between colonial and
postcolonial penality with specific regard to one of the most notorious penal measures in
colonial India, the sanctioning of ‘criminal tribes’ and the punishing of habitual offend-
ers. Brown finds more continuities than disruptions and thus argues that independence
did not bring about the ‘rupture in penal practices’ that many might have expected.
Instead, he finds that ‘what became possible and was thought desirable when the open
horizon of postcolonial statehood lay before the new India’s governing classes’ was more
continuous with the colonial punishment than one might have thought. We congratulate
Mark Brown on this award.
We look forward to another exciting year at Theoretical Criminology. Our May issue
will be a Special Issue on “Twenty Years of Green Criminology,” which will commemo-
rate the twentieth anniversary of TC’s first special issue on green criminology, published
in our 2nd Volume in 1998. This new special issue will be both retrospective and prospec-
tive, providing a critical survey and discussion of theoretical questions and directions in
green criminology, and bringing together some of the ‘original’ voices from 1998 with
some of ‘newer’ ones.
Mary Bosworth and Simon Cole
683794TCR0010.1177/1362480618760117Theoretical CriminologyBrown and Smith
research-article2018
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