Review of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason by Biko Agozino. London: Pluto Press, 2003

Abstract

Counter-Colonial Criminology A Critique of Imperialist Reason challenges Criminologists and readers alike to re-examine traditional criminology or what we have been indoctrinated as orthodox criminology. This book re-educates the reader about criminology by revealing the disciplines bifurcation and complexity on matters affecting humanity especially during colonial era. To put it succinctly, criminology as a science was the bedrock of crimes of imperialism. Colonial Criminology was a science used to justify legal enslavement and economic exploitation of the colonized among other atrocities. For example as noted by the author, in 1791 the enslavement of Africans in Haiti was permitted by French law but they revolted against their European masters. According to the author, as a profit-driven system of abject terror and capitalist economic exploitation, the institution of slavery systematically punished the innocent. But unlike the large number of individual criminal offenses targeted for punitive deterrence by Frances Revolutionary Penal Code, Slaverys punishment of the innocent was not declared a crime, an example of a bifurcated colonial criminology (pg xi).