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.
‘Race’ and the invention of the criminal.
Former lawyers bade men study Justice, but Lombroso bids Justice study men
van Hamel cited in Radzinowicz and Hood, 1986: 17
Social entrepreneurs of the late eighteenth-century understood what they considered crime as having its origins in ‘deficiencies of the laws’ rather than any ‘general depravity of the human character’ (Colquhoun, 1796: 440). Influenced by Beccaria and Bentham their focus was on creating a suitable apparatus of effective policing and the imposition of appropriate penal sanctions. However, in the nineteenth century this changed and by its end Raffaele Garofalo (1914: xxvii, emphasis in original) was able to declare that criminology had discovered ‘an enemy mysterious, unrecognized by history … the CRIMINAL.’ How was this discovery possible? ‘In Europe,’ Clare Anderson (2004: 181) has pointed out, ‘ideas about criminal typology were inextricably linked to readings of race and social evolution.’ This association used the criminal’s alleged similarities with non-Europeans (i.e., colonial subjects,) to legitimise their exclusion and denial of citizenship rights. For example, in 1861 Henry Mayhew (2008: 3) declared that all human beings could be divided into two races: ‘the wanderers and the settlers – the vagabond and the citizen – the nomadic and the civilised tribes’ each of which had its own ‘peculiar and distinctive physical as well as moral characteristics.’ This Othering characterised much criminological discourse with, for example, Garofalo, declaring that ‘(t)he typical criminal is a monster in the moral order who has characters in common with the savages and other characters that make him descend below humanity’ (cited by Forero, 2017: 181). This link, between the criminal and the ‘savage’, was a recurring theme in nineteenth-century criminological discourses. From its foundation, criminology – to establish the criminal as a distinct identifiable type – drew on racist myths of racial difference.
Alejandro Forero (2017: 180-181) has highlighted this link by pointing out that ‘the birth of criminology emerged in openly racist texts’. Lombroso’s racism was not some unfortunately personal defect but provided the intellectual unpinning and social context of his theories. As Willem Bonger (1943: 71) has argued, for Lombroso ‘race, explains everything’; a conclusion confirmed by Lombroso (2006:175) arguing that ‘few have understood the behavior of savages to be criminal or recognized in it the origin of modern criminality.’ As Agozino (2003: 69) has highlighted the ‘dominant assumption in criminology is that prisoners are not normal people’. This required theorizing to differentiate the criminal from the non-criminal, a process ‘premised on assumptions of superior and inferior races representing white and non-white races respectively’ (Kalunta-Crumpton, 2004: 7). ‘Race’ was therefore not only ‘the organising grammar’ of the imperial project (Stoler, 1995: 27) but it was a grammar eagerly adopted by criminology. Racism, and the understandings of the concept of race it promoted, was central to the imperial project (Solomos et al., 1982: 11). Constructions of race were deployed to legitimise occupation, slavery, genocide and other colonial violence (Wolfe, 2016). Race, or more specifically white European racism, was deployed to distinguish the coloniser from the colonized and subsequently ‘to establish and naturalize imperial inequality’ (Kolsky,2010: 14). Racism therefore challenged the concept of the universal human being. Difference, the superiority of some types and the inferiority of racialised Others, was naturalised.
As Catherine Hall (2002: 7) has pointed out constructions of race ‘depend on the production of stereotypes which refuse full human complexity.’ Through cartoons, newspapers, periodicals and books, often written by slavers, racist caricatures of Black and other non-white people were relentlessly repeated to create the racialised Other. A West Indian Planter (1788: 9) in an attempt to justify slavery, wrote that Africans ‘do no more work, than they are compelled to do by the terrors of punishment’. An unwillingness to work was one of the innate characteristics consistently claimed for the African, another was their insatiable sexuality. Bryan Edwards (1793: 82-3), slaver and politician claimed that the African, ‘both men and women’, were possessed of a ‘passion’ that is ‘mere animal desire’. In 1788 the Gentleman’s Magazine, which James Walvin (1982: 60) has described as ‘perhaps the most popular and influential periodical of the day’, claimed:
The Negro is possessed of passions not only strong but ungovernable; a mind dauntless, warlike and unmerciful; a temper extremely irascible; a disposition indolent, selfish and deceitful; fond of joyous sociality, riotous mirth and extravagant shew … Furious in his love as in his hate; at best, a terrible husband, a harsh father and a precarious friend.
Cited in Walvin, 1982: 60
For William Cobbett (1829: 344, 144), champion of the rural labouring classes, enslaved Africans, ‘the unhappy creatures whom nature has marked out for degradation’ were ‘always lazy and saucy; nothing but the lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment’. Although Black and Brown people have lived in Britain, particularly its ports and cities, throughout history, for many white English people these discourses would have been how they learnt about non-white people (Olusoga, 2016). Through publications like the 1810 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they would have learnt that ‘the Negro’ was ‘an unhappy race’ whose characteristics included ‘idleness treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance’ (cited in Walwin, 1982: 70). Racism and its stereotype of the racialised Other, subsequently reinforced by racist pseudoscience, legitimised Britain’s slavery and colonialism (Saini, 2020).
For the founders of criminology racist ideas of difference and the racialised Other meant that new forms of ‘knowledge and theory become possible’ (Foucault, 2002: xxiv). Whereas Beccaria, Colquhoun, Howard, Bentham and their European predecessors knew their criminals not as the Other, but as rational beings, motivated by the same forces and influences as anyone else, racist ideas made possible new ways of thinking and seeing the world. In respect of the criminal question, the criminal as the Other could be born. Initially the criminal was morally defective, a damaged creature requiring reformation. Hence the references in the mid-nineteenth century to prisons as ‘moral hospitals’ (see for example, Hill, 1857: 103). The focus had moved on from discovering the appropriate police arrangements and penal sanctions to deter all from crime, to an attempt to know the criminal and the particular regime of treatment they required. This search was to lead to the discovery by Lombroso (2006), and other early criminologists, of the born criminal, an incurable primitive being, beyond reform, sub-human and entirely unlike the normal person. What better way to express the discovery of the criminal than by establishing, scientifically, differences in the skulls of the criminal Other.
The previous part of the essay can be read here: Criminology, its colonial origins and its relationship with the state
The next section of this essay can be read here: Beyond the criminal question: the need for a decolonial abolitionist praxis.
If you want to check out my sources please see the essay’s reference list
Trincomalee walks 
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