Session 11:

Abolish New Carceralities

Saturday 17 April 2021 ~ 6:45 - 7:35pm Pacific

Let's Make Justice Tribal Again: Where Abolitionists, Victim’s Rights Advocates, Neoconservatives and Neoliberals Meet

Austin Lawrence

Garland’s 2001 book “The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society” explains how late modern trends in our society’s emerging criminal justice system have been characterized by two opposite, and seemingly contradictory, criminological tendencies: 1) the ‘criminologies of everyday life’; and, 2) the 'criminologies of the other’. These two trends in criminological approaches have changed administrative practices, laws, and legal conventions. Other key criminological trends are the contemporary pressures of abolitionist critiques which assert that deconstructing particular criminal justice institutions will produce more justice for society overall and for oppressed groups in particular, as well as the voices of victim’s rights advocates. The common denominator of these trends is victim dissatisfaction with their power of agency vis-a-vis other justice system participants. The last time the British-descended justice system did not require public police or incarceration was when Germanic peoples organized their societies tribally, prior to the establishment of the monarchal state. This paper identifies elements of the contemporary criminal justice system where the interests of abolitionists, victim’s rights advocates, neoliberals, and neoconservatives may intersect to produce new criminal justice projects which could ‘make justice tribal again’.

Austin Lawrence is on education leave from the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence, Public Safety Canada. His doctoral research work is being conducted at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Austin has worked as a criminologist in the Canadian federal government for two decades. Austin has applied research experience that covers subcultures of crime, policing, hate crime, racism, violent extremism, mentally disordered offenders, crime reporting, ethnogenesis, etc. Austin was a representative on the Police Information and Statistics (POLIS) Committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) and Statistics Canada for many years.

Criminal Justice: A Minority View

Mohammad Salahuddin

Prompted by many stories about “the system” that my students tell every semester, this paper challenges some of the common assumptions about “criminal justice”, the very concept which, though assumed to be self-evident by CJ academics, is hardly assumed as such by most black students, at least by the brighter ones, in the graduate seminar I teach at Chicago State. Because of their direct experience and daily encounters with “the system”—as they, like Nelson Mandela, call it—these students see criminal justice as an efficient, unstoppable machine that will not slow down until the last black man in their community is caught in its wings. Hence it is absurd, they think, to doubt the efficiency of a machine that is getting closer to accomplishing its unstated mission known only to those victimized by it; likewise, they insist that it is futile to talk about criminal justice reform which a machine like this, of this size and scale and power, has rendered obsolete long ago.

Dr. Salahuddin (alias Salahuddin Ayub) does not own a television, but reads imperishable books written by his favorite authors like Neil Postman, Claude Levi-Strauss, Henry Glassie, George Kubler, Rabindranath Tagore, etc. His recent publications in foreign language include a book on theory: Paul de Man and the Disappearance of Literature (Dhaka 2018).