Book Review: Race,Ethnicity,Crime,and Justice: An International Dilemma

In Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice: An International Dilemma (2^nd ed.), Dr. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah and Dr. Shaun Gabbidon use a colonial perspective to contextualize racial and ethnic inequalities in the justice systems of Great Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Specifically, they suggest that “the colonization process produced long-standing inequalities that, in each society, undoubtedly contributed to race and ethnic groups being overrepresented in their respective criminal justice system” (p. 178). This text joins a growing collection of scholarship that aims to push criminologists and criminal justice practitioners to investigate the historical root causes of contemporary race and justice issues.

Owusu-Bempah, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and Senior Fellow at Massey College, and Gabbidon, a Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice at Penn State Harrisburg, have extensively published on topics relating to race, ethnicity, crime, and justice. The preface, however, is where Owusu-Bempah and Gabbidon's voices are the strongest. In this section, the authors acknowledge the ways in which their lived experiences have shaped their research interests generally and their approach to this research specifically. Owusu-Bempah, born to a British mother and a Ghanaian father in the wake of Britain's 1980 race riots, and Gabbidon, a naturalized American citizen born in Wolverhampton, England to Jamaican parents, both attribute their interest in, and awareness of, colonial legacies to their multiracial and multiethnic upbringings. By engaging in this reflexive practice, Owusu-Bempah and Gabbidon are answering calls the scholars of Lumsden and Winter (2014) who argue, “evidence-based research and engagement with the criminal justice system or other powerful institutions must be done in a tempered, critical and reflexive manner” (p. 2). The engagement in a documented reflexive practice is extremely refreshing in a field that far too often fails to acknowledge the impact of self on scientific endeavors.

In Chapter 1, the authors define key terms, discuss the role of official data in the racialization of crime, and introduce the book's guiding framework: the colonial model. They use Tatum’s (1994) conceptualization of the colonial model, which acknowledges traditional (or external) colonialism, as well as settler (or internal) colonialism. The latter describes how racial minorities are assigned subordinate statuses that lead to economic, political, and social subordination that have negative impacts on the level of crime and the perception of crime levels in communities of color. In one of their clearest examples of why engaging with this perspective matters for contemporary criminologists, Owusu-Bempah and Gabbidon reproduce a figure that depicts how internal colonialism precedes other conditions that are often key features of foundational criminological theories (e.g., social disorganization, cultural of violence, culture conflict, etc.). In other words, foundational criminological theories would have a difficult time fully explaining race, ethnicity, crime, and justice without also discussing the influence of colonialism. This model, the authors argue, provides a unique, fresh, and historical perspective to explain why racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted by criminal justice systems around the globe.

In Chapters 2 through 6, the authors show how colonial legacies have contributed to the racialization of crime and the criminalization of race in each of the selected societies. These chapters are uniformly structured as follows: early history, contemporary history, overview of socio-demographics, overview of crime and justice, and a discussion of race-based data and scholarship. Within each chapter, the authors include several figures and graphs of national official data on socio-demographics, crime, and victimization. These visual representations, which are accompanied by in-depth historical profiles, provide cursory views of the modern landscape of each country and make for easier cross comparisons. The book is also filled with citations to race and justice research produced by scholars, including several prominent scholars of color, who transcend disciplinary and geographic borders.

In Chapter 7, the authors conclude by encouraging academics – especially those who teach – to keep an open dialog on these issues and to deal with the proverbial “elephant in the [class]room” (here, the elephant being whiteness). They also suggest future directions for race and justice scholarship. Specifically, the authors underscore a need for more criminological scholarship about race and crime in historical context and encourage scholars to contribute to the growing subfield of whiteness studies within criminology.

This book underscores the importance of historically contextualizing the complex relationship between the topics of race, ethnicity, crime, and justice. As the authors remind us, spending time on history allows those who are interested in race and justice issues to better understand the conditions that have resulted in racial and ethnic minorities being disproportionately enmeshed in justice systems. Evidenced by the newly established Division of Historical Criminology (DHS) within the American Society of Criminology, the field of criminology is finally acknowledging the need to incorporate historical approaches and methodologies into criminological research – which, as Owusu-Bempah and Gabbidon convincingly argue in this book, must include race and justice scholarship.

The case study selections in this book were largely driven by the authors’ interest in examining the impacts of repressive systems on racial and ethnic minorities in post-colonial countries. The criteria for selection included the readily availableness of national official data and discussion about race and crime issues in the respective society. Their ultimate choice of primarily Global North societies (with the notable exception of South Africa) admittedly “only scratches the surface of the problems across the globe” (p. 172). Despite this admission, their selections run the risk of reinforcing misconceptions about societies in the Global South as being devoid of official data and disengaged from the race and justice conversation.

As the authors aptly acknowledge in the conclusion, quite a few scholars are producing work in and about societies other than those selected for analysis in this book. It is for this reason that I believe this was a missed opportunity to acknowledge that built into our own academic practices are biases produced by the very colonial legacies that the authors discuss. This, in fact, is the central pillar of Southern Criminology (e.g., Carrington et al., 2018) – a subdiscipline whose tradition is rooted in decolonizing the study of criminology by spotlighting the work of scholars who produce research from and about societies in the Global South. This premise is very much aligned with the overarching aim of this book, and I would encourage the authors to engage with this work in future editions.

The release of this book has serendipitous timing, as college campuses around the world are responding to increased calls for coursework on issues of race and justice. The presentation of information in an accessible and easy to understand format makes it a suitable textbook for undergraduate and early graduate courses that aim to introduce students to a comparative perspective on race, ethnicity, crime, and justice. This topic may be of interest to students in criminology, sociology, history, and possibly anthropology, given its framework within the colonial model. The authors explicitly state that it was never their intention to produce a definitive work on the topic; rather, it was to acquaint scholars with the ongoing dialog on the international nature of race and justice issues. I believe that the book achieves this aim by challenging those interested in issues of race, ethnicity, crime, and justice to see these topics as “an international dilemma”.