Race matters in criminology: Introduction to the Special Issue
| Author | Rod Earle,Coretta Phillips,Alpa Parmar |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620930016 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
930016TCR0010.1177/1362480620930016Theoretical CriminologyEditorial
editorial2020
Editorial
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(3) 421 –426
Race matters in criminology:
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Introduction to the Special
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620930016
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Alpa Parmar, Rod Earle and Coretta Phillips
Abstract
As race scholars and criminologists we are attuned to Du Bois’s (2007: 106) still
meaningful injunction to ‘oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain
gangs the poor, the friendless and the Black’. Yet we have become concerned that
criminology seems rather inured to the long-standing and deeply entrenched patterns of
race and criminal justice which characterize many high-income countries, and certainly
England and Wales and Australia, which are the geographical focus of this Special Issue
of Theoretical Criminology.
Keywords
criminological theory, criminology, introduction, postcolonial, race matters, racism
As race scholars and criminologists we are attuned to Du Bois’s (2007: 106) still mean-
ingful injunction to ‘oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the
poor, the friendless and the Black’. Yet we have become concerned that criminology
seems rather inured to the long-standing and deeply entrenched patterns of race and
criminal justice which characterize many high-income countries, and certainly England
and Wales and Australia, which are the geographical focus of this Special Issue of
Theoretical Criminology (see also Bosworth et al., 2008; Phillips and Bowling, 2003).
Looking back, in 2020 to a 1974 edition of the US journal Issues in Criminology devoted
to race and crime, we find much that is uninspiringly familiar: ‘[o]ur sense [. . .] that race
and crime is neither a new or unexplored area’; ‘[a]lready too much scholarship being
done in criminology is done with the tacit understanding that “although I don’t mention
the issue of race explicitly, it is, of course, a factor”’; and ‘[r]acism has been shown to be
so deeply rooted in the criminal justice system that further study produces somewhat of
a numbing effect’ (Editors, 1974: 1).
422
Theoretical Criminology 24(3)
We hope to demonstrate that—despite the seeming numbness felt about the racialized
nature of crime and criminal justice—there is still a critical need for refreshed intellec-
tual engagement which we make strides towards here. This Special Issue draws from a
collection of papers presented at an international symposium entitled ‘Race matters: A
new dialogue between criminology and sociology’, held at the London School of
Economics in September 2018. The aim was to reinvigorate this race and crime subfield
of criminology, enriching it with an infusion of theoretical concepts and ideas from the
sociology of race and ethnicity, while also exposing its marginality in the mainstream of
our discipline.
The first part of this Special Issue entitled ‘Conscious criminology’, tackles the con-
scious and unconscious structures, social relations and practice of Anglophone criminol-
ogy. Phillips et al. conduct an exercise in institutional reflexivity by excavating British
criminology’s production of racial knowledge and the hidden presuppositions that shape
it. Criminology is not alone among the social sciences in being subject to renewed scru-
tiny in relation to race and racism and we have drawn from this...
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