The Howard League and liberal colonial penality in mid‐20th‐century Britain: The death penalty in Palestine and the Kenya Emergency
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| Author | Lizzie Seal,Roger Ball |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12513 |
Received: 6 January 2022 Accepted: 12 July 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12513
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The Howard League and liberal colonial
penality in mid-20th-century Britain: The death
penalty in Palestine and the Kenya Emergency
Lizzie Seal1Roger Ball2
1Lizzie Seal is Professor of Criminology,
University of Sussex
2Roger Ball is Research Fellow, University
of the West of England
Correspondence
Lizzie Seal, Professor of Criminology,
University of Sussex.
Email: E.C.Seal@sussex.ac.uk
Funding information
British Academy,Grant/Award Number:
BA/IC3/100170
Abstract
This article analyses the Howard League’s campaigning
against the death penalty in mid-20th-century British
colonies. It examines two case studies: the Howard
League’s campaign to limit the death penalty in the
Palestine Mandate in the 1930s and their silence on mass
executions during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s.
Drawingon Ben-Natan’s (2021) concept of the dual penal
regime, we argue the Howard League concentrated its
intervention in ordinary penal regimes and demarcated
emergency penal regimes as outside its sphere of interest
and influence. Consequently, it was silent on the penal
excess of colonial authorities during periods of counter-
insurgency. Criminology as a discipline largely shares
this demarcation of the penal measures associated with
colonial wars, militarism and states of emergency as
beyond its purview.Inclusion of these aspects of colonial
penality into the criminological narrative highlights the
significance of colonialism and colonial ways of thinking
to penal liberalism.
KEYWORDS
colonialism, death penalty, Howard League, Kenya Emergency,
Palestine, penal liberalism
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited.
© 2023 The Authors. The Howard Journalof Crime and Justice published by Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2023;62:149–166. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 149
150 THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
1 INTRODUCTION
On 2 June 1930, the Howard League for Penal Reform’s Colonial Subcommittee held its first
meeting.1At this time, the Howard League had a keen interest in international penal reform.
The establishment of this subcommittee followed the opening of the Howard League’s Interna-
tional Bureau in Geneva a year previously, which had a special focus on prison conditions and
aimed to get penal reform onto the agenda of the League of Nations.2The purpose of the Colo-
nial Subcommittee was to gain an overview of penal administration in the colonies of the British
Empire and to intervene to bring about improvements and modernisation. The subcommitteewas
argued to be necessary ‘especially in regard to the treatment of the natives’.3In keeping with the
Howard League’s priorities, the Colonial Subcommittee intended to maintain a focus on prison
conditions, especially those for young people.4
The work of the Colonial Subcommittee also involved intervention in relation to capital pun-
ishment. Their stance on the colonies was that the death penalty should be abolished, but they
were willing to intervene to ameliorate its use in lieu of full abolition. In 1932, in response to the
imposition of 60 death sentences in Kenya for the murder of someone believed to be a witch, the
Colonial Subcommittee resolved to approach the Colonial Office to suggest revising the law to
enable discretion in sentencing and the use of alternatives to capital punishment, which would
bring the law in Kenya in line with the Indian Penal Code.5At this time, the death penalty in
Britain was mandatory for murder so the Indian Penal Code was more liberal on this issue than
the law in the metropole.
This article analyses the Howard League’s campaigning in relationto the death penalty in mid-
20th-century British colonies. It does so through two case studies: their campaigning to limit the
death penalty in the Palestine Mandate in the 1930s and their silence on mass executions dur-
ing the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s. The majority of the Howard League’swork in the colonies
concerned prisons but the death penalty is also instructive as an example through which to under-
stand its involvement with colonial penality. As Dubber(2018, p.7) argues, capital punishment is
‘the sharpest point of the sharp end of the stick of state penal power’, which shows the distinc-
tion between the ‘abstract threat of penal violence’ and ‘the infliction of that threatened violence
on a particular person’. As we shall discuss, the civilian death penalty was not the sharpest end
of the stick of colonial penal power. Penality is bound up with the legitimacy of state power, but
this power operated differently in colonial territories and protectorates than in the liberal state
(Ben-Natan, 2021).
We drawon Ben-Natan’s (2021) analysis of the ‘dual penal regime’ in Palestine to contextualise
the discussion of the Howard League’s campaigning activities. She adapts Dubber’s (2018) con-
cept of the dual penal state, according to which liberal penal governance rests on the duality of
the penal law and penal police. Dubber (2018) argues that these two paradigms coexist but are
in opposition, creating a paradox. The penal law has an egalitarian identification, whereby crime
is the violation of one person’s autonomy by another. The penal police is hierarchical and crime
is an offence against the state’s sovereignty. Empire is more openly illiberal than the liberal state
and colonial penality needs to be understood differently from the national dual penal state. There
is no pretence in colonial settings that ‘penal law’ applies equally to everyone (Ben-Natan, 2021).
In particular, racialised enemypopulations – those perceived as a threat to colonial rule – are tar-
geted by colonial law. The dual penal regime encapsulates the separate penal regime established
by use of emergency powers that ran (and runs) in parallel to the ordinary penal regime. Emer-
gency statutes ‘feature broad criminalization of political and military resistance, prosecution of
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