Indigenous Criminology C. Cunneen and J. Tauri. Bristol: Policy Press (2016) 176pp. £48.00hb ISBN 978–1447321750

Indigenous Criminology seeks to establish ‘a new explanatory model for understanding Indigenous peoples’ contact with the criminal justice systems’ (p.1). It focuses on the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Aoteroa New Zealand, and Australia. While an emphasis on Indigenous people's contact with criminal justice is not new (as the authors highlight, ‘a veritable criminological industry has arisen that focuses on Aboriginal crime’ in Australia (p.161)), traditional criminological and criminal justice research has ignored the cultural and historical context of this encounter. Cunneen and Tauri seek to redress this by placing at the centre of their study the role played by colonialism in shaping Indigenous people's experience of the criminal justice system today. In all four settler colonies examined, Indigenous communities, as a direct result of colonialism, suffer from profound social, political and economic marginalisation. Central features of this are their over-representation in contemporary criminal justice systems and the high rates of victimisation that Indigenous communities suffer. This is not a recent development. ‘Criminalisation and punishment were central’, Cunneen and Tauri argue, ‘to the operation of the colonial state in its governance of Indigenous people’ (p.52). This link, conceptualising criminal justice as a strategy of colonialisation, is central to their analysis. However, it is not clear where Cunneen and Tauri place colonialism historically. Is it something that occurred in the past or is it an ongoing process? The chapters on the experience of Indigenous women (Chapter 5) and on Indigenous perspectives on punishment (Chapter 6) are essential reading. The first highlights how all the inadequacies of policy makers and criminologists in respect of the Indigenous experiences of colonialism and racist criminal justice are intensified in the case of women. As a case study in intersectionality, it is exemplary. The second raises the question of what, if any, common ground there is between Indigenous responses to conflicts/harms and settler colony criminal justice. Where Indigenous practices are adopted, Cunneen and Tauri show how they become incorporated in Western values and are twisted to fit dominant values and epistemologies, a process they name as ‘Indigenisation’ (p.144). While its harms are admirably detailed, colonialism is presented as an independent phenomenon without reference to its intimate relationship to the political economy of capitalism and its ideological underpinning in liberalism. This absence presents problems in developing an agenda for moving forward. If the colonial rejection of customary Indigenous law was necessary for the imposition of capitalism in the colony, how can space be made for Indigenous people's self-determination within an unchanged capitalist economic structure? Similarly, Cunneen and Tauri acknowledge that ‘many may argue’ (p.47) that the ultimate agenda of settler colonialism is genocidal, yet they are unclear about their own position on this issue. If colonialism is genocidal, surely this rules out any possibility of reform? By setting out to answer ‘how do criminal justice system institutions develop in a manner that can deal fairly with competing citizenship demands and maintain legitimacy for different social groups?’ (p.18), Cunneen and Tauri underpin their study with the implicit assumption that the institutions of colonisation and its criminal justice system are a fixed, unchangeable given. This attempt to locate Indigenous criminology within the paradigm of criminal justice reform is partly explained by their perception of criminal justice in the metropole as being ‘neutral, fair and universal’ with ‘(e)quality before the law and equal protection … seen as the defining features of the rule of law’ (p.49). This is compared with the settler colonies where ‘the rule of law was suspended in relation to Indigenous peoples’ (p.49). Undoubtedly, it was in the colonial context that the most extreme examples of exceptionalism can be found, but the tendency was (and still is) also clear in the metropole. Indigenous Criminology raises important issues for the discipline of criminology which it identifies ‘as a colonial project in the continued subjugation of Indigenous people’ (p.24). As well as critiquing criminology's incapacity to integrate a colonial or Indigenous perspective, Cunneen and Tauri detail how the discipline has actively participated in the oppression central to the colonial project. It is, therefore, not without irony that after such an effective critique of the discipline of criminology, the authors conclude that the way forward is through the development of an Indigenous criminology. By seeking to establish their intervention within the discipline of criminology – indeed to, as they claim, engage in a ‘process of decolonising criminology’ (p.12) – they are ultimately constrained by its subject matter: crime and criminal justice. Having convincingly detailed, in the settler colony, the intimate relationship that both criminology and criminal justice have with colonialism, they fail to establish a case for using these same paradigms for developing an emancipatory agenda. Criminology as a discipline has been subjected to many critiques in its encounters with different epistemologies. Its response has been to seek to incorporate these challenges into its own paradigm. Reacting to an earlier encounter, Carol Smart (1990) observed that ‘it is very hard to see what criminology has to offer feminism’ (p.84). While this book has demonstrated what criminology can learn from Indigenous knowledge and perspectives, this reviewer remains unconvinced about what criminology can offer in return.

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