This is an extract from my chapter “Abolition and (De)colonisation Cutting the Criminal Question’s Gordian Knot” recently published in the book Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems, edited by Ana Aliverti, Henrique Carvalho, Anastasia Chamberlen and Máximo Sozzo. The whole book, including my chapter, is available as an open access pdf here.
Beyond the criminal question: the need for a decolonial abolitionist praxis.
We cannot be moderate.
Angela Davis, 2016: 145
Criminology and the criminal question’s relationship with decolonisation is best described as a Gordian knot, a problem that is impossible to resolve in its own terms. It cannot be untied but requires cutting. In this section I argue that the tool allowing us to sever this knot is abolition. What distinguishes abolition from other perspectives on the criminal question is that it does not see the criminal justice system as having (ultimately resolvable) problems but that it is the problem. Rather than seek ways to correct its failures, for example by decolonising it, abolition seeks to dismantle criminal justice. From an abolitionist perspective ‘the criminal question’ is the wrong question. As the activist group Critical Resistance (undated) highlights: ‘abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It is also about undoing the society we live in’. It is this commitment to revolutionary social change that echoes Fanon’s (1967: 27) recognition that at its core decolonisation ‘sets out to change the order of the world’. Whilst abolition’s initial focus is on addressing the needs of those who have been harmed, it recognises that this ultimately necessitates ‘transforming the power structures and immediate social relations that breed harm in the first instance’ (McLeod, 2019: 1623). Abolition and decolonisation have in common a recognition that they can only be achieved by transforming the world we live in.
Abolition is often dismissed as utopian and therefore a distraction from immediate reforms needed by the criminal justice system. Such a critique not only ignores reform’s long history of failure (Moore, 2009) but misunderstands utopian thinking. What makes an idea utopian is not that is not achievable, but that ‘it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs’ (Mannheim, 1936: 173). Perspectives such as abolition (or indeed decolonisation) seem impossible because a critic ‘who has consciously or unconsciously taken a stand in favor of the existing and prevailing social order’ has blurred ‘the distinction between absolute and relative unrealizability’ (ibid: 177). In the sense that abolition or decolonisation cannot be attained within the current unjust social order they are correct. Both require a new social order. This does not mean ignoring the injustices and sufferings of the present. Abolitionists, whilst ultimately aspiring to a radically changed society, recognise and contribute to addressing immediate concerns, for example by engaging in prisoner solidarity and campaigning for reforms (PSN, 2021). However, whilst most reformers are motivated by a desire to see the criminal justice system function better, and thereby often contribute to strengthening and expanding the system, abolitionists focus on reforms that contract the system and improve the rights and living standards of those ensnared by the penal state. Abolitionist reforms ultimately aim to undermine the system and expose the contradictions between penal laws’ stated objectives and the reality of how it functions. For abolitionists the institutions of criminal justice – courts, police and prisons – do not function in a just manner, they may claim to protect us, respond to those who harm us and distribute justice, but these are alibis designed to mask penal law’s real function, maintaining an unjust social order. Whilst reformers focus on criminal justice’s failure to deliver on its stated aims, abolitionists highlight that in reality it is a success, delivering its real function (Moore, 2015; Kaba, 2021: 6-13). Decolonisation similarly perceives contemporary social structures, both within and beyond penal law, as products of colonialism, designed to facilitate oppression, exploitation and genocide. Colonialism’s legacy of racism is an inherent feature of both the economic structure and the superstructure which sustains it. It is not something that can be reformed; decolonisation ‘entails nothing less than an endless fracturing of the world colonialism created’ (Modiri, cited by Adebisi, 2019). Like abolitionism it necessitates the replacement of the contemporary colonial/capitalist social order.
When faced with the question of the feasibility of living without police and prisons, abolitionists have argued that this is the wrong focus; abolition is ultimately ‘about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems’ (Gilmore and Murakawa, 2020). Colonialism has contributed to the making of our unjust society. Decolonisation is a demand for justice. But not the justice of the courtroom or penal law. What is required is much more akin to how abolitionists perceive justice, as ‘an integrated endeavour to prevent harm, intervene in harm, obtain reparations, and transform the conditions in which we live.’ (McLeod, 2019: 1615) This approach allows us to imagine a different world, where conflict can be resolved, and harms addressed, without recourse to penal law’s focus on locating an individual who can be allocated blame and pain. Indeed, abolitionists are already seeking to develop such approaches outside the agencies of penal law. Through transformative justice interventions abolitionists have developed responses that have a commitment to, firstly, avoiding causing more harm and violence (including systemic harms/violence) whilst, subsequently, addressing immediate needs – for safety, healing, accountability etc. (Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, 2013). Many of these initiatives have emerged in Black and Indigenous communities, for whom they represent decolonisation as much as abolitionist organising.
As this chapter has detailed above, penal law and the institutions of criminal justice were designed to maintain an unjust social order. Their imposition on colonised societies swept away long-established customs that had maintained their moral economies’ social order to facilitate the imposition of colonialism’s capitalist political economy. Today in the metropole penal law disproportionately impacts on the most powerless and marginalised communities, including the descendants of those colonised. In settler colonies penal law continues the ongoing process of colonisation, by sustaining settler dominance and targeting Indigenous communities. In the independent postcolonial states, the retention of colonialism’s penal law functions as an impediment to achieving decolonisation. Given penal law’s complicity with colonialism historically and its contemporary role sustaining colonial relations and institutions it is impossible to decolonise the criminal question. Likewise, criminology’s commitment to both explaining crime and the existence of the criminal Other makes it impossible to decolonise. Crime is a European concept; a legal construct determined by the state to reflect the values and interests of the dominant class; colonialism was built using penal law to legitimise and enforce European rule. Criminology emerged in the late nineteenth-century and established itself by its creation of the criminal Other, utilising the racism of race pseudoscience, which had invented the racialized Other to justify European colonialism. Criminology has from its birth been intimately linked with colonialism and racism, indeed as Juan Tauri (2018: 5) has argued, ‘criminologists often contribute to the political enterprise of inclusion/exclusion through the very act of doing criminology’. As with the criminal question, to talk of its decolonisation is inherently contradictory. This does not mean that criminologists (or other academics) can ignore the decolonisation agenda. But it does require them to approach decolonisation from an abolitionist perspective. In particular they need to draw on the work undertaken by abolitionists to distinguish between reforms which strengthen the system and reforms that are consistent with an abolitionist objective (Mathiesen, 1974). We need to ensure that we prioritise the needs of those oppressed by colonialism, and those engaged in the ongoing struggles to decolonise our society, rather than the needs of our careers, our discipline, our institution, the state or (for many of us) our whiteness.
Writing about abolition Mariame Kaba (2021:4) has argued that ‘if we keep building the world we want, trying new things, and learning from our mistakes, new possibilities emerge.’ Abolitionism is a very different way of thinking but, possibly more importantly it is also a practice (Lamble, 2021). Decolonisation also requires us to work and live in ways which allow new possibilities to emerge. European colonisation was incredibly destructive, ‘elaborate systems worked out to cope with nature and with one another were often destroyed, leaving human beings at the mercy of a social order more cruel and more incomprehensible in its chaos, its illogicality and its contradictions than nature itself’ (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1986: 66). Both criminology and the criminal question are ultimately part ‘of the world colonialism created’ and as such they need ‘fracturing’ (Modiri cited in Abebisi, 2019). But as well as ‘fracturing’ we need, as Kaba has advocated, to be ‘building the world we want’. It will be a very different world and include possibilities we cannot yet imagine. It will also allow the recovery of many of the ‘elaborate systems’ colonialism destroyed. Abolitionist and decolonising praxis can work together to create this new world. Let us be inspired by Franz Fanon’s conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth:
So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.
Fanon, 1967: 254
To seek to decolonise the criminal question or to create a decolonised criminology, without abolition at its heart, is to risk creating such ‘an obscene caricature’.
The previous part of the essay can be read here: ‘Race’ and the invention of the criminal.
If you want to check out my sources please see the essay’s reference list
If you want to read the full essay it is chapter two of the book Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems, edited by Ana Aliverti, Henrique Carvalho, Anastasia Chamberlen and Máximo Sozzo.
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