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Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
1
15. INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE OF AUTHORITARIAN CRIMINOLOGY
Juan Marcellus Tauri
INTRODUCTION
Biko Agozino (2010: i) has described the discipline of criminology as a ‘control-freak’;
one whose ‘imperialist reasoning’ is most evident when supporting ‘the [contemporary
states] exercise of internal colonialism and neo-colonialism’ within settler societies. In
recent times the development of supposed evidence-based crime control policy
throughout Western jurisdictions appears to have reinvigorated administrative
criminological formations to the extent that they once again dominate policy discourse
relating to the issues of Indigenous over-representation and critique of the operations of
criminal justice. This chapter seeks to explore this state of affairs by firstly, providing a
critical examination of the role criminology plays in the continued neo-colonial
subjugation of First Nations and secondly, the role that myth construction and
maintenance plays in the hegemonic activities of a particularly authoritarian form of the
discipline. A critical analysis of two articles from a recent Australian and New Zealand
Journal of Criminology special edition on Aboriginal violence (late 2010) highlights the
core features and, arguably, the key failings of this authoritarian criminology in relation
to its response to Indigenous justice issues: namely a preference for undertaking
research on instead of with Indigenous peoples, the privileging of non-engaging
research methodologies and the potent use of myth to promote practitioners views of the
world and silence the Indigenous voice.
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF AUSTRALASIAN CRIMINOLOGY
The assumption that those who read this chapter will be familiar with the broad history
of the discipline of criminology is no doubt justified. Therefore, this allows me to make
a sweeping glance over this history as it pertains to the formation of the discipline in
Australasia.i Of course we all know that the power of positivistic, administrative or
Eurocentric criminology, call it what you will, was seriously challenged from the 1960s
onwards by the advent of various critical criminologies. These critical perspectives
shared in common a rejection of (amongst other things) servicing the needs of the state
and the overwhelming focus on ‘individual antecedents’ of criminality. What
distinguished these approaches from administrative formulations was their focused,
critical gaze on the institutions of social control, and the impact of divisive,
disempowering social structures (Scraton and Chadwick, 1991, see also Carrington and
Hogg, 2012: 47–8).
Muncie (2000) argues that the radical critique was so vociferous that some on ‘the
left’ anticipated the demise of criminology itself or at the very least a retrenchment of
the administrative and positivistic varieties. This supposition seriously overestimated
Juan Marcellus Tauri
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the power of the radical perspective while underestimating the resilience of positivist,
Eurocentric forms of criminology. It ignored the fact that even if the individualised,
Eurocentric focus of administrative criminology for a time lost its shine in terms of
dominating journal and book publications, academic awards and the like (a highly
debatable supposition), its tendency for theoretical imperialism and its sycophantic
relationship with the state ensured it continued to receive the attentions of policy-
makers (Kitossa, 2012).
By the end of the 1980s the rejuvenation of law and order politics in the United
States under Reagan, and Great Britain under Thatcher, brought with it the resurrection
of an administrative criminology revived after the suffocation of the nothing-works
paradigm of the 1970s. Once again, positivistic criminologies were invited back into the
governmental fold as Western jurisdictions turned increasingly to tough-on-crime
approaches to social harm (Shichor, 2000). The resurrection of administrative,
embedded criminologies entered its end game in the mid-1990s when policy industries
in various Western jurisdictions implemented so-called evidence-based policy (EBP)
processes that the likes of Tony Blair and his New Labour government predicted would
bring about the end of ideological policy making (Marston and Watts, 2003). Instead,
we had entered a new world in which evidence derived from scientific research, would
dominate policy development (Walters, 2009). The rise of EBP meant that that once
again, positivistic, administrative criminological approaches became the acceptable face
of the academy for policy makers. The situation was the same in various neo-colonial
contexts, with the exception of New Zealand and Australian administrative criminology
practitioners and policy makers who preferred to look to Europe and North America for
theoretical and empirical inspiration (Carrington and Hogg, 2012: 48, Webb, 2003).
To infer that criminology, or at least particular derivatives of the discipline are
Eurocentric is not to ignore variations in epistemological, methodological preference
and theoretical nuances that exist in our eclectic discipline. However, from an
Indigenous standpoint the term encapsulates the cultural, social and economic roots of
the European academy’s intellectual evolution.ii As Agozino (2010) and Cohen (1988)
contend, the colonial enterprise that took place from the sixteenth to the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuriesiii was central to the theoretical and empirical evolution of the
discipline of criminology. The imperialist underpinnings of contemporary criminology
are eloquently captured in Agozino’s observation that:
It was at the height of the slave trade that classicism emerged to challenge the arbitrary
nature of punishment in medieval Europe but this insight was not extended to enslaved
Africans who were arbitrarily victimised even when they did nothing wrong. However, it
was not until the height of colonialism in African and Asia that Europe discovered the
new ‘science’ of criminology as a tool to aid the control of the other – a supposed
advancement on classical philosophies of justice. (Agozino, 2010: vii)
Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
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THE HEGEMONY OF AUTHORITARIAN CRIMINOLOGY IN AUSTRALASIA
The issue of Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system has been a
significant focus of criminological work in Australasia for the past quarter century.
Until the advent of the golden age of Indigenous-informed, Australian criminology in
the 1980s and 1990s, much of the initial academic material was generated by those
working within the administrative criminological vein. During this period a group of
mainly European criminologists published extensive material that privileged the
Aboriginal experience of crime control policy and gave voice to their issues, much of it
without the requisite filtering processes of the policy industryiv (for example see Blagg,
1997, Clifford, 1982, Cunneen, 1994, 1997, 2000 and Dodson, 1994). This body of
work represented a significant change from the diet of government funded material that
masqueraded for objective, value-free research we had been subjected to in the past (one
exception being the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,
1991). The period from the late 1990s onwards has seen a re-empowerment of neo-
conservative, state-centred criminological perspectives on the Blackfella/Maori
problem. Unfortunately, as will be discussed later in this chapter, much of the material
emanating from this perspective adds to the discipline’s sad history of abetting the
subjugation of First Nations, proving that the Eurocentric, embedded components of the
discipline are failing to learn from the discipline’s abusive past.
Contrary to the claims of adherents such as Weatherburn (2010), the majority of
criminological material that is influencing public policy and media discourse on the
Indigenous question, emanates from approaches that are predominantly quantitative in
method, and largely ‘Aboriginal free’ in terms of data gathering and engagement with
the research population. The body of work that is considered of value to the policy
sector and mainstream media, is predominantly statistically-focused and government-
funded (for example but not exclusively, see Bond and Jeffries, 2010, Jeffries and Bond,
2010, Marie, 2010, Newbold and Jeffries, 2010, Snowball and Weatherburn, 2006 and
2007, Weatherburn, Fitzgerald and Hua, 2003, and Weatherburn, Snowball and Hunter,
2006 for exemplars of the type of material produced by embedded Australasian
criminologists).
There are a number of reasons why the material produced by embedded
criminological approaches is proving popular with both policy-makers and mainstream
media. One forceful explanation is that the body of work this paradigm produces largely
avoids critical analysis of the policy-making process. It avoids or sidelines complicated,
messy structural determinants such as racist policing, racist court processes, racist
Government policy and legislation (most recently demonstrated in the Australasian
context by the introduction of the Federal Government’s Northern Territory Emergency
Response in 2006: see Altman, 2007). These supposedly difficult to measure
determinants of Indigenous marginalisation are often dismissed through flippant and
empirically weak contentions that institutional bias and structural determination have
Juan Marcellus Tauri
4
dominated (and negatively impacted) Aboriginal policy making (see Marie, 2010,
Weatherburn, 2010 and discussion below). This argument and many others form the
great myths through which administrative, embedded criminologies seek to maintain
hegemony in the race to be of utility to the state (see below for in-depth discussion of
the importance of myth for administrative, embedded criminologies).
I argue that the resurrection of administrative criminologies has seen the
development of a form that is particular to settler societies, including Australasia. To
this peculiar form I give the name Authoritarian Criminology. This new form of
criminological formulation appears to serve the interests of the neo-colonial state,
Eurocentric academic institutions, and the career aspirations of practitioners. Of lesser
concern are the needs of Indigenous peoples who serve simply as the providers of
empirical data for analysis. As such the practice of Authoritarian Criminology
represents a contemporary exemplar of Agozino’s control-freak discipline. It is the
contemporary form of embedded criminology that continues the discipline’s history of
collusion with the state and the continued, neo-colonial subjugation of Indigenous
populations (as illustrated in the work of Agozino, 2003 and Cohen, 1988).
The pursuit of Authoritarian Criminology is readily identified by the following
core practices of its exponents, including that they:
focus their research and social inquiry on the definition and conceptualisation
of crime as defined by the state;
confine their critical criminological gaze to issues relating to state-defined
problem populations, more often than not people of colour and working class
youth, without significant engagement with individuals or communities from
these populations;
confine their uncritical criminological gaze to state-run justice processes,
policies, legislation and problems and questions that the state deems important
for which they receive remuneration via the establishment of contractual
relations;
limit their critical analysis of state systems and policies on programme
effectiveness and evaluation largely devoid of historical context and wider
political economy of the state’s dominance of justice in the neo-liberal
moment;
empower themselves through the veil of scientism, an ideological construct that
privileges their approach to measuring the Indigenous life-world, whilst
denigrating Indigenous (and other) forms of knowledge that seek to explain the
social world from the perspective of the Other (see, for example, Marie, 2010);
and
Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
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utilise the process of myth construction and maintenance in a hegemonic
exercise aimed at privileging its ‘way of knowing’ in the policy-making
process, over that of potential competitors.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF AUTHORITARIAN CRIMINOLOGY
The critique of postmodern thought notwithstanding, it is a fact that many criminological
theorists make extensive use of analogy, myths [emphasis added] and literary allusions in
their construction of reality. (Agozino, 2003: 110–11)
As Agozino observes, myth construction and maintenance is an essential element in the
development of the discipline of criminology, and its construction of reality. I argue that
as Authoritarian Criminology is geared toward supporting the neo-colonial state and,
either by osmosis or intent, a significant player in the continued subjugation of
Indigenous peoples, its myth construction and maintenance activities warrant closer
consideration (Tauri, 2004).
Myth, criminology and policy making
For a discipline that is populated by empiricists driven to identify the causal laws of
crime through scientific investigation, the claim that it relies on myth for its legitimacy
might appear strange. To understand this claim we need to push aside the veil of
scientism that practitioners surround their practice with and accept that ideological
artefacts such as these are central to the business of ‘doing Authoritarian Criminology’
(or, indeed, any form of the discipline). I accept that exponents of Authoritarian
Criminology are genuinely committed to producing scientific data on the social world in
order to inform an evidence-based, politically neutral, policy-making process.
Unfortunately, those aims are difficult to achieve when policy-making and academic
social inquiry are both highly ideological and political activities. And as they are
ideologically and politically driven, they are by their very nature highly dependent on an
‘alternative dimension of myth’ (Herzog and Abel, 2009: 4) to support their hegemonic
activities; hence the parasitic relationship between the two entities (see Tauri,
forthcoming). I argue that the myth-making of Authoritarian Criminology is reflective
of the gap and tension between the ‘ought’ and ‘is’ characteristic of institutional,
knowledge development practices in the academy and the public service. Accordingly,
the academy’s knowledge construction and policy development are duplicitous
activities where ‘... the ought [emphasis added] provides a fantasised or glamorised
ideal that the is [emphasis added] of practices should be achieving’ (Tauri,
forthcoming).
The creation and maintenance of myth is fundamental to Authoritarian
Criminology’s hegemonic endeavours because of the important part it plays in
mediating opposition and ‘justifying decisions regarding major issues’ such as policy,
legislation and funding of both research and interventions (Tauri, forthcoming). Myth
construction and maintenance is particularly helpful for taming internal coordination
Juan Marcellus Tauri
6
problems (that is, competition within and between various criminologies and, in
particular the lived experience of problem populations, for the attention of the policy-
makers and their finite resources) and external one’s (that is, nullifying the potentially
politically damaging impact of independent scrutiny by Indigenous commentators and
more critically inclined criminologists) ‘because myths, by their very nature, disguise
and manage the emotional impact of the stories they tell’ (Tauri, forthcoming).
Therefore, myths play a useful role in hiding the real story behind the intent and likely
impact of Eurocentric knowledge construction.
Myth creation and substantiation run deep through Authoritarian Criminology, and
two recent papers (one substantive and one, while comparatively short, nonetheless
instructive for this discussion) appeared in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Criminology (2010, vol. 43(2)) that provide contemporary exemplars of this process.
These are Danette Marie’s Maori and Offending: A Critical Appraisal, and Don
Weatherburn’s Guest Editorial: Indigenous Violence.
The myths that underpin Authoritarian Criminology are clearly identifiable in the
work of Weatherburn and Marie in particular. Analysis of this body of work identifies
four key myths central to the hegemonic activities of Authoritarian Criminology:
the myth of Eurocentric objectivity and the veil of scientism;
the myth of the dominance of Indigenous/communitarian perspectives;
the myth of the Indigenous dominance of evaluation and research on
Indigenous policies; and
the myth of the Indigenous dominance of policy-making, intervention design
and research is the primary reason for the failure to reduce over-representation.
For the purposes of this chapter, the rest of this section will analyse the use of the
first two myths as exemplified in the Marie and Weatherburn articles.
The myth of objectivity and the veil of scientism
The key to this myth is their presentation of Authoritarian criminological knowledge as
the valid form for informing policy-making because it is derived from scientific
observation of the social context, and its practitioners are both objective and value-
neutral. In contrast, other forms of knowledge construction are unscientific, ideological,
value-laden and therefore biased. And in this category practitioners place Indigenous
techniques for knowledge construction and dissemination.
Marie’s paper provides a solid example of a type of mythology-driven knowledge
destruction at work. For example, in her paper she makes two significant, albeit poorly
evidenced claims common to the practice of Authoritarian Criminology: first, Maori
formulations of knowledge are unscientific and should therefore play no part in crime-
Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
7
control policy development. The equation of non-European knowledge construction as
both non-scientific and ‘science destructing’ is highlighted in statements such as ‘[t]he
rationale of FReMO [a guide for assisting Department of Corrections official to develop
“effective” Maori policy] involves heightening the significance of culture for Maori and
diminishing the history and integrity of science [emphasis added]’ (Marie, 2010: 290).
In addition, the contested claim that Maori policies and interventions are unscientific
because there is no evidence to prove either the theories upon which they are based or
the efficacy of the programmes that emanate from them is deeply problematic. Hence
Marie’s claim that ‘[i]t might seem incongruous that an entire state services sector has
committed to an approach that was not wrought from empirical evidence’ (Marie, 2010:
294) either misconstrues or ignores a range of evaluative documentation and Maori-
generated theoretical materials.
Marie’s point about the lack of evidence for Indigenous theories and interventions
has some validity. However, these claims appear to be unaware of the politics of crime
control policy in the New Zealand context, especially as it relates to the development of
Maori-specific policy. Any balanced and informed critique would acknowledge the
following, fundamental truth about the criminal justice sector in New Zealand: that it
has an extremely poor history of carrying out (or contracting) scientific, outcome-
focused research/evaluation into the efficacy of it policies and interventions. This lack
of empirical analysis of the crime control in New Zealand pertains to the entire suite of
policies and interventions whether they are informed by Tikanga Maori, or Crime
Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) or some other theory (see Tauri,
2011).
The mythological construction of Maori approaches represented in Marie’s paper, is
based on a lack of sustained, critical analysis of the efficacy of scientifically-derived
interventions. Nowhere in this paper does Marie provide significant evidence that these
categories of programmes (for example, Multi-Systemic Therapy, corrections-delivered
criminogenic programs, CPTED and so on) are working in any substantial (or
empirically verifiable) way to reduce Maori offending/reoffending. And yet, as will be
discussed later, New Zealand offenders are far more likely to receive the kind of
scientifically-derived treatment. In comparison, they are much less likely to take part in
Tikanga-inspired interventions that Marie contends are having a negative effect on
Indigenous recidivism rates (see offenders’ comments in Te Puni Kokiri, 2007 and
especially Department of Corrections, 2009b).
The myth of the dominance of Indigenous/communitarian perspectives
The purpose of this mythical construct would have us believe that the development of
effective solutions to the Indigenous problem has been hampered in neo-colonial
jurisdictions by a) the rise of Indigenous cultural theory, b) the biculturalisation of state
policy, which led to c) the policy sector in Australasia turning away from science and
embracing cultural perspectives on crime control for First Nations. For the likes of
Juan Marcellus Tauri
8
Weatherburn (2010) this explains the predominance of policies and interventions geared
to conferencing processes, circle sentencing and enhancing the cultural practice of
agents and agencies, and a focus on bias and structure rather than individual antecedents
of crime. Marie (2010) makes a similar claim when she writes that Maori theory
dominates crime control policy development in the New Zealand context. She goes on
to present a misleading summation of Maori theory by erroneously presenting it as
primarily focused on cultural loss as the key determinant of Maori offending and over-
representation:
A major assumption of this theory is that the contemporary overrepresentation of Maori
... is best understood as the outcome of Maori experiencing impairments to cultural
identity resulting from colonisation. Central to this theory ... is also the assumption that
ethnicity is a reliable construct by which distinctions can be made between offenders
regarding what factors precipitated their offending, as well as best practices for their
rehabilitation ... rehabilitation efforts largely pivot on the idea that restoring cultural
identity will lead to a subsequent number of Maori in prison. (Marie, 2010: 283)
To support her argument Marie cites Newbold’s (2007) summary of the types of
programmes currently en vogue in corrections. Yet inexplicably, Marie overlooks
preceding chapters of Newbold’s book which demonstrate that within the Department’s
theoretical paradigm, culture and cultural identity are not given causal power: in other
words, culture neither causes crime, nor is a significant player in reducing it. In fact,
culture (specifically Maori culture) is confined to the responsivity trance of the
Department’s theoretical and practice framework, where restoring cultural awareness is
viewed as a helpful process for preparing individual Maori offenders for treatment (see
Coebergh et al., 2001, especially pages 15–16 and Webb, 2012).
Marie appears be to unaware of the fact that the so-called Maori theory she is
critiquing, is in fact a construct of government officials and contractors; a governmental
interpretation of Maori knowledge and cultural practice. What she presents as Maori
theory is in fact a policy framework employed by state institutions to indigenise (and
colour) the programmatic requirements of the institutions (see Tauri, 2011 and Webb,
2012). It is difficult to comprehend how Marie could miss this situation given the
documentation she cites are entirely constructed by crime control agencies and not from
external, independent Maori (or indeed, non-Maori) sources. Marie fails to contemplate
that she is not dealing with Maori theory, or Tikanga-based interventions, but neo-
colonial artefacts of government officials, criminologists and psychologists ‘jobbing’
for the Crown’s coin and utilised to satisfy the needs of agencies (see McIntosh
(forthcoming) and Tauri (2009) regarding the duplicitous nature of government
institutions use of Maori symbols, Tikanga (theory) and responses to social harm). The
dominance of positivistic theory in Corrections policy programme, and the subjugation
of Indigenous perspectives are evident in all relevant departmental documents, as
demonstrated in the following text from a Department of Corrections (2009b) review of
the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes:
Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
9
It is now generally accepted that treatment programmes should be adapted to cater for the
cultural needs of offenders who participate. As such, culture represents an important
responsivity issue within offender rehabilitation. Incorporating culturally-based
concepts, imagery and activities into programme content is regarded as a way of both
attracting minority-group participants into programmes, and ensuring that the
programme engages and retains them [emphasis added]. (Department of Corrections,
2009b: 42)
Weatherburn (2010) accentuates this particular myth of the dominance of Indigenous
perspectives and a focus on structure (that is, bias) in policy responses when he argues
that:
... debate about how to respond to Indigenous violence have focussed less on the question
of how to reduce it than how to reduce the effect of Indigenous violence on Indigenous
contact with the criminal justice system. The general consensus on this issue seems to be
that the best way to reduce Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system is to create
some tribunal or process that gives Indigenous community members a voice in how to
respond to crime by Indigenous defendants. (Weatherburn, 2010: 198)
Both Marie and Weatherburn’s positions can be described as mythological
constructs. Neither author appears to have engaged thoroughly with the vast amount of
material generated by administrative criminological and government institutions that
demonstrate the wide array of official responses to Indigenous crime, of which
conferencing processes, liaison officers, and so on, form only a small component of an
extensive intervention strategy. Nor have they engaged with the sophisticated material
Indigenous and non-Indigenous have produced examining Indigenous over-
representation in Australasia or any of settler society jurisdictions. If they had they
would find that Indigenous and critical scholars in New Zealand (including Jackson,
1988, Tauri, 2009, Webb, 2003), Australia (Blagg 2000, Cunneen, 2008 and Dodson,
1994), and Canada (Gosse, Henderson and Carter, 1994, Monture, 1999 and Victor,
2007) provide sophisticated, multifaceted explanations of the Indigenous experience.
This material also reveals the wide range of interventions, such as habilitation centres,
and culturally and socially specific therapeutic approaches to a wide range of risk
factors, to use the preferred terminology of Authoritarian Criminology, that Indigenous
scholars and practitioners have designed.
It is accurate to state that issues like bias, institutional racism, colonisation, and
militaristic-style policing strategies are key foci of counter-colonial, Indigenous
criminologies. However, it is duplicitous to argue that they are the only explanatory
factors that Indigenous (and non-Indigenous), critical scholars identify as key
explanations for Indigenous over-representation. The key issue that Marie and
Weatherburn miss is that it is the state that has demonstrated a preference for culturally
sensitive processing of Indigenous crime, exemplified by agency controlled
programmes such as group conferences, sentencing circles, Indigenous sentencing
courts, Indigenous liaison officers, Memorandum of Understanding, Aboriginal Justice
Juan Marcellus Tauri
10
Strategies and such like (Tauri, 2011). These types of state-centred responses invariably
lack jurisdictional autonomy (for First Nations), legislative weight and receive
significantly less funding in comparison to mainstream policies and interventions. In
reality, a significant proportion of settler state responses to the Indigenous problem are
simply orientalised artefacts that enable the state to be seen as doing something while
avoiding independent (Indigenous) analysis of the failure of its crime control processes
to provide meaningful justice outcomes for subjugated populations (Tauri, 2011).
A thorough engagement with crime control texts produced by government agents
(such as Cabinet papers, key strategies, research documents, and so on) demonstrates
that the overarching theoretical paradigms that dominate the sector derive from
Eurocentric theories. Furthermore, the vast majority of interventions that Indigenous
offenders receive emanate from positivistic criminological and psychological
paradigms. The predominant forms of therapeutic and preventative programmes Maori
offenders participate in are not based on Tikanga Maori, as Marie claims. The literature
shows that Marie’s argument that Maori dominate the design of correctional
interventions and the evaluation and research process is nothing more than a
mythological construct. For example, a review of key documents demonstrates that the
dominant theory of the Department of Corrections is the Psychology of Criminal
Conduct imported wholesale in the mid-1990s from Canadav and life
course/developmental theory (see Department of Corrections, 2007). Likewise, the
Ministry of Justice (2005, 2007) policy programme is dominated by CPTED and
Rationale Choice Theory in relation to its crime prevention work programme and life-
course and other developmental approaches that inform youth justice (McLaren, 2000
and Ministry of Justice, 2002).
Contrary to the mythic claims of Authoritarian Criminologists such as Marie and
Weatherburn, a thorough review of available research and government texts
demonstrates that:
1. Maori theory (Tikanga, kaupapa) does not dominate policy making in any of
New Zealand’s crime control agencies (see Waitangi Tribunal (2005) for
outline of the dominance of Eurocentric theory);
2. the vast majority of policy, legislation, intervention design and funding
decisions are informed by Eurocentric, imported theories and interventions (for
example, see the Ministry of Justice (2009a, 2009b) generated material on the
recent Drivers of Crime project in New Zealand); and
3. the vast majority of government spend in New Zealand’s criminal justice
system goes to imported, Western crime control programmes.vi
CONCLUSION
Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology
11
I have no doubt that some criminologists working in Australasia and within the
identified Authoritarian criminological paradigm, will find this chapter challenging. I
am just as certain that my text will be dismissed by some as aggressive and emotional.
These are terms that Indigenous scholars hear too often when members of the academy
chose to avoid engaging with the Indigenous critique. Soynika (1994, in Agozino, 2007)
aptly justifies the decision to speak to power in such uncompromising terms when he
states that:
... [w]hen power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called
into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and fling its
excesses back in its face, [and that] ... language must communicate its illegitimacy in a
forceful, uncompromising language of rejection, seeking always to make it ridiculous and
contemptible, deflating its pretensions to the core. (Soynika, 1994: xiii–xiv, quoted in
Agozino, 2007: 2)
Given the mythological nature of so much of Authoritarian Criminology’s work and
the influence it has on policy, the time clearly has come for Indigenous scholars to
challenge the hegemony of criminological practitioners who empower themselves to
speak for us, while employing mythological constructs to silence our voices. This call to
arms can be justified through a number of rationales, although just two will suffice here.
The first is that we have the right to speak for ourselves, which involves critical scrutiny
of what others say and write about us. The second rationale comes in the form of an
empirical question: for all its science, objectivity and generous government support,
what tangible outcomes has Authoritarian Criminology (or more widely, Positivistic
Criminology) delivered to Indigenous peoples? An empirically informed answer to the
question must surely be ‘not much’. Unless of course we measure effectiveness in terms
of more Indigenous peoples in prison, ever increasing police resources employed to
target Indigenous communities, more orientalised, state-centred conferencing models
and more meaningless Indigenous justice strategies.
A peculiar irony of Western criminology is that its administrative formulations and
so much of its theories of crime and interventions are constructed in high crime
societies (Agozino, 2010). A further irony is that many Western criminologists seem to
believe it is their duty to ‘teach the coloured folk’ about how to solve their crime
problems by exporting failed policies and theories to Third World nations (Agozino,
2003). Worse still is the fact that Authoritarian Criminologists residing in the Third
World and settler societies (such as Australia and New Zealand) continuously support
the importation of failed, scientific interventions, whilst utilising the veil of scientism to
shield their activities from the critical gaze of the Indigenous Other. When challenged
for foisting alien processes on our communities, criminological experts respond by
regurgitating ideological statements about evidence-based policy, international best
practice and the efficacy of acultural interventions (Tauri, 2011). Like so many First
Nation scholars and justice practitioners I have heard this self-serving rhetoric time and
again. And yet I never fail to be surprised by the silence that emanates from
Juan Marcellus Tauri
12
Authoritarian Criminology to our simple refrain: ‘why is so much of this criminological
work carried out on our behalf, but without the necessary engagement with our
communities’?
NOTES
i The term Australasia is used as a collective term for the separate, neo-colonial jurisdictions of
Australasia and New Zealand.
ii Carlen (2010) and Carrington and Hogg (2012) have advised against imagining criminologies to the
point of creating monolithic constructs and intellectual dichotomies such critical vs. administrative
approaches and such like. Carrington and Hogg (2012: 46–47) argue that ‘[s]uch exercises in distancing
… have borne little intellectual fruit over the years, let alone in the present when critical work in
criminology has become unmistakably “mainstream” in Australia … as elsewhere’. While acknowledging
the validity of this critique in terms of the eclectic nature of the discipline, the historical and
contemporary role of the discipline in subjugating Indigenes is readily identifiable via critical analysis via
an Indigenous standpoint.
iii Agozino (2010: i) positions criminology firmly as a key technology of social control in the colonial era
when he writes that ‘Control-freak criminology was there from the beginning of imperialism when the
attempt to pacify the rebellious natives and stabilise foreign domination of finance capital was politely
referred to as the “native question” … to which the answer was a pattern of pacification that has been
identified as gun-boat criminology’.
iv During the same period New Zealand produced little material that privileged the Maori experience of
criminal justice. Instead, criminologists and policy makers offered a diet of Eurocentric, uncritical policy
statements, exemplified by the Reoffending by Maori (RoBM) project (see Williams, 2001). Exceptions
are Moana Jackson’s (1988) groundbreaking report He Whaaipanga Hou (Maori and the Criminal Justice
System) and Jackson (1990, 1995); in terms of historical work, Chapter Two of John Pratt’s (1992)
Punishment in a Perfect Society and Alan Ward’s (1995) A Show of Justice: Racial Amalgamation in
Nineteenth Century New Zealand.
v See Newbold (2007), Webb (2003) and the majority of the department’s policy documents since 1996
including the Department of Corrections (2001 and 2009b). See also the Department’s (2009a) evaluation
of Maori Focus Units and therapeutic programs for evidence that standard, western evaluation methods
dominate the agency’s research process, even when initiatives are supposedly Tikanga-based. All this
material is available either online and through an Official Information Act request.
vi During the now defunct Effective Interventions initiative (2006-2007), Te Puni Kokiri officials were
informed by crime control agencies that Maori initiatives (which are likely to include programs, such as
‘counselling’ that derive from non-Maori theoretical sources) received less than 10 per cent of the sectors
spend on ‘therapy’ and other forms of intervention (Tauri, 2011).
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