Whiteness in Criminology: Indigenous Overrepresentation

Criminology is one of many instruments in the settler colonial toolkit, arming colonizers with a powerful regime of “truth” to support criminal justice systems that judge, label, and punish those who do not conform. In Australia, the criminal justice system sits at the pointy end of an institutional labyrinth that continues the violent Othering and “normalization” work of 233+ years of White settler colonialism. As Australian prisons continue to fill with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (from herein, “Indigenous”) peoples, criminologists’ and policymakers’ deficit-driven gazes still overwhelmingly remain trained at Indigeneity as a “risk factor” for criminality. Meanwhile, there is a continued failure to interrogate how White epistemology and institutions socially construct criminals in the image of Indigenous peoples, while ignoring the countless crimes perpetrated under the impunity of White settler colonialism. This chapter follows the lead of others to interrogate criminology as an implicitly colonizing force. It argues that greater attention should be given to the non-neutrality of criminological discourses around deviance and that this demands stronger and far more critical attention to Whiteness and its mobilization of criminology as a technology of control. The chapter also explores how crime metaphors spread into other policy areas to justify the punishment of Indigenous peoples beyond the criminal justice system. In conclusion, the chapter argues that it remains to be seen whether a meaningful decolonization of the discipline of criminology is possible, or whether abolitionism (as called for by some scholars) is a more appropriate response.