This article attempts an ambitious undertaking by scholars collaborating from far flung parts of the globe to redefine the geographic and conceptual limits of critical criminology. We attempt to scope, albeit briefly, the various contributions to criminology (not all of it critical) from Argentina, Asia, Brazil, Columbia and South Africa, in alphabetical order. Our aim is not to criticize the significant contributions to critical criminology by scholars from the Global North, but to southernize critical criminology-to extend its gaze and horizons beyond the North Atlantic world. The democratization, decolonization and globalization of knowledge is a profoundly important project in an unequal and divided world where knowledge systems have been dominated by Anglophone countries of the Global North (Ball, this issue;Connell, 2007). Southernizing fields of knowledge represents an important step in the journey toward cognitive justice as imagined by de Sousa Santos (2014). While we can make only a very small contribution from a selected number of countries from the Global South, it is our hope that others may be inspired to join the journey, fill in the gaps, and bridge global divides.
The democratic transition in Brazil witnessed the return of civil liberties and the emergence of a legal framework based upon respect for human rights and the adoption of extensive social entitlements. In recent years, the reduction of poverty and upward social mobility have also transformed the country’s social structure. In spite of these welcome changes, however, crime and prison rates went through a steep upsurge during the same period, undermining many of these more positive social changes. A number of reasons underlie the emergence of this predicament, ranging from large structural shifts to the piecemeal adoption of harsher criminal laws. Enmeshed in these developments nonetheless there is also important institutional modifications in the configuration of the criminal justice system. The present argument seeks to understand how the recent thrust in the modernization of state institutions helped to create this situation of crisis. The expansion, densification, and standardization of the criminal justice apparatus has prompted its greater effectiveness and, thus, contributed to the current predicament of high crime rates and mass incarceration in the country.
Traditional theoretical accounts in the sociology of punishment largely overlook the situation of crime control and mass incarceration outside Western democracies. In this sense, their explanatory power has a limited reach. It is fundamental to engage with different contexts for expanding the scope of this transdisciplinary field, while also rethinking its foundational canons. By thinking through the global-south, the present argument advocates the development of a decentred perspective to punishment and crime control. In a two-pronged approach, the article argues that peripheral countries have attempted to modernize their criminal justice apparatuses, while social control in Western democracies has increasingly adopted postcolonial features. The aim is not only to expand this scholarship by encompassing more diversity, but also to refine existing accounts through insights from other realities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.