Global & Alternative Approaches to Criminal Justice Flashcards
What is border criminology?
- Studies the tools used to punish and deter migration through border controls
- Stumpf argues there is now ‘crimmigration’ a merger of criminal law and immigration
- Immigration is meant to be an administrative tool and carry civil offences, but this has been changing
- Notes how post 9/11 national security concerns accelerated these trends and led to mass detention and deportation
What are the historical antecedents that can be drawn on to explain modern border controls?
Bosworth
* Since 9/11 and 7/7 laws have been posed at ‘reducing risk’ of a vague external threat (i.e. idea of terrorism)
* Aim is to differentiate one from the other
Aas
* Media portrayals of asylum seekers as bogus, fraudulent and scroungers conflate public fears, mixed with security concerns about supposed terrorism threats
Stumpf
* In the late 20th and early 21st century laws expanded to impose severe consequences for immigration violation and non-citizens who commit crime
* Post 9/11 security concerns accelerated these trends
Arab uprising of 2011 led to long summer of migration in 2015. The hostile enviroment policy in the UK aimed to make life so difficult that they would choose to leave themselves
How has the UK moved towards a system of crimmigration?
- Increasing use of immigration detention, Bosworth studied Manston holding facility noting how it was overcrowded, same meals served daily and a man dying due to illness
- Short term solutions have become longer term plans that are not suited
- Government argues detention is necessary to facilitate the removal of people who have no right to be in the UK but refuse to leave voluntarily
- Actual carrying out of these processes is more criminal
- Nationality and Borders Act 2022, removed distinction between entry and arrival. Increased penalties, 4 years imprisonment for arriving in country
What have academics argued about border controls?
Bosworth
* If the concern was security, close community monitoring and effective reporting would be sufficient
* There is a focus on criminalising foreigners in all respects, sharp distinction between those who are deserving and undeserving
* Double edge sword, ‘risk’ will always increase whilst more harsh tactics are used
Aas
* Border criminology has not reached mainstream as they are still concerned with the ‘outsiders’ who are still ‘insiders’ to the Western club
* Increasing channels of communications means we cannot view states from what simply happens inside them
* Beck, fragmentation of the word into nation states removes accountability for global inequalities
Bowling and Westenra make similar arguments
Who is the target of studying border criminology? What is the benefit?
- Migrant has no clear definition, constantly being redefined by political sphere (e.g. idea of economic migrant is new creation)
- The right to asylum is meant to be an internationally protected right, could argue this being eroded, e.g. Rwanda deal
- Argument by some that we should move towards a term of ‘people on the move’ rather than using the terms migrant and refugee due to the confusion this causes and lack of consensus
- The UK by accepting asylum of a national from another country is making an adverse statement about that country and their government
Can border controls ever be legitimate?
Depends on the supposed purpose and aim of such border controls. Carceral forms of control meant to be in order to ‘facilitate the removal of people who have no right to be in the UK but refuse to leave voluntarily’
Bosworth
* Manston holding facility, overcrowded with same meals being served and a man dying due to illness
* Detention centres often built in former penal centres with security given to third party companies
* Number of people held in detention long outnumbers those that have actually been deported
Griffiths & Walsh
* Detention meant to be used as a last resort, yet there is no statutory limit as to how long someone can be detained for
* Unregulated power like this pushes us more towards crimmigration, in which case border controls cannot be legitimate because that is not their purpose
What is state crime and how useful is this notion?
Green and Ward
* State crime is ‘state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights’
* State is given a broad meaning in the Marxist sense to refer to a public power and agencies that levy power
* State is legitimate to the extent is secures legitimate to the extent is acts in accordance with the rules it sets for itself and its citizens based on shared beliefs (???)
* By identifying the operative’s goals of an organisation or sub-unit that we can distinguish between individual and organisational deviance
* Former is for direct personal benefit, the latter in accordance with the operative goals
* An organisation’s reaction to individual deviance will be an indication of the deviant act’s perceived compatibility with organisational goals
* Human rights are included to exclude trivial cases, these are certain fundamental needs that we all share
Is genocide best understood as an individual or a state crime?
Sutherland: ‘Criminology is the making, breaking and enforcing of laws’
* How can state crime comply with this when it is the one that decides what is lawful?
* Must think there is great difference between the domestic and international context and how we prosecute offenders
* Is the punishing of one or a handful of individuals truly representative of the harm done? What is the alternative to imprisoning individuals?
* May be unfair to punish the state as a whole, peoples participation may be due to indoctrination or duress, state will also be weak and this could lead to further harm
Why and how did victims become killers in the Rwandan genocide?
- In 100 days, around 800,000 people were killed, specifically members of the Tutsi minority group, targeted by Hutu extremists
- Carred out with meticuolous organisation, lists of political opponents were given to militia and roadblocks were set up to check peoples ethnicities and kill them
- Propoganda urged people to ‘weed out cockroaches’, neighbours and families killing one another with machetes
Mamdani
* Argues genocide resulted from both top-down political planning and bottom-up social participation
* The genocide must be understood within the colonial history, these policies lead to the racialised division of the two groups
* The genocide was not simply an ethnic conflict but an attempt to erase a racialised foreign presence
What role can criminal trials play after mass violence?
USEFUL ROLE:
* Gives the sense of some justice being done, countries themselves often ask for the ICC to intervene after the events
* If the judges and justice system in the country have been apart of the violence, or turned a blind eye, this is the best way to ensure a fair process
HARMFUL ROLE:
* Often based on western practices and ideas about criminality and justice, overlooking domestic and indigenous beliefs
* State will be fragile, trying to enforce a different model of criminal justice can create more instability
* Criminal trial is simply the first step, cannot just punish individuals and except things to change
* Trials should be used alongside practices in the community to ensure that devestating events do not happen again
* May only be done based on the supposed utility of the country to prominent actors. May lead to a difference of what we prioritise in the state, e.g. justice, peace
In what ways can the International Criminal Court be considered a ‘racist’ institution?
What are the alternatives to international criminal justice and what problems do they encouter?
Allen
* ICC intervention is a neocolonial experiment that ignores the realities and understandings of victims
* Focuses on Uganda, how indigenous practices focus on acknowledgement of responsibility, repentance and compensation not imprisonment
McEvoy
* Legalism is a scholary and practical tendency to privilege law and legal frameworks over other social, political and community based forms of justice
* Human rights have taken a western-centric approach, must rethink transitional justice
* Must adopt a more pluralistic, interdisciplinary and community driven approach
* Law is an essential but limited tool, by adopting other approaches transitional justice can be more responsive to the needs of post conflict communities
What is the difference between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism?
White
ECOCENTRISM: Valuing nature for its own sake, social practices should incorporate ecological sensitivites and the intrinsic value of nature. Entities are right holders and objects warranting a duty of care because their interest are significant
ANTHROPOCENTRISM: Privileges humans and their interests over and above non-human interests. We are ends in ourselves and other entities are only means of acheiving goals
Should criminal justice be based on ecocentric rather than anthropocentric principles?
NO
* White proposes wild law which seeks to prioritise the long-term preservation of all subjects by regulating human behaviour
* Crook notes that the Whanganui river in New Zealand was given legal personhood
* No matter how we phrase or look at these, whether they may be better, they are still anthropocentric
* They are based on human assumptions and beliefs about nature. This is not to say that we cannot have an approach in the law based on humans where the environment is protected
* Law is a human endavour in the first place
* Could be more a tool of governments, giving back to marginalised groups that have been the subject of discrimination over years
What is green criminology and what are the problems with it?
Beirne et al
* Provided a way for criminology to confront the harms that affect the planet as a whole
* Addresses issues such as animal abuse, biodiversity loss, deforestation and pollution
* Idea of species injustice and the link between factors like capitalism, colonialism
* Useful for drawing wider links across the whole discipline and thinking about the planet as a whole
* How far can it go?
Goyes & Sollund
* Argue that biotechnological applications reflect an anthropocentric view of nature
* Urge researchers to consider the intrinsic value of nonhuman life
* Encourages a shift towards a more just and ecologically responsible relationship with animals
* Is this really possible when there is not even equality within our own species? Link to theories on race, gender and intersectionality
What is ecocide?
Crook
* Large envrionmental destruction is often a precursor to genocide, especially for indigenous groups whose survival is tied to their land
* Colonialism and capitalism has done so for the extraction of resources
Term ecocide first used by Galston during the Vietnam war to describe the damage done by bombs and gas dropped by the US
* International lawyers proposed definition that includes ‘unlawful or wanton’ acts done with knowledhe that there is a likelihood of ‘severe’ and ‘widespread or long-term’ damage to the environment
* Standard for prosecution would be very high, but would be a landmark change in fight against the climate crisis
* Support from many levels across the world, countries like Vanuatu and Belgium asking the ICC to do something
What are the problems with ecocide and criminalizing it through the International Criminal Court?
- Would face similar problems to genocide, would be a high threshold that may be difficult to prove
- Could only prosecute individuals, how can one be held be responsible for the acts of many?
- ‘Wanton’ requirement still includes some kind of cost benefit analysis, suggests that some wrongs could be justified by economic arguments
- Selective enforcement, ICC often faces critcism for being a Court of Africa, may face similar problems
- ICC relies on state co-operation which is often based on their own personal geopolitical relations and desires
- Could be argued that there is a chain: these countries committing ecocide, is it not being done for the benefit of western countries? E.g. deforestation for the purpose of Western businesses
What is the difference between the anthropecene and the capitalocene?
Kunkel
* Anthropocene: Argues new geological period is based on the promenance of humans in the planet and our effect on the planets chemistry. Said to have started in 17-18th century, but arguments run as late as the 1940s
* Capitalocene: Proposed by Moore, says capitalism has marked a turning point in humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature
Issue with the first is it supposes the change is because of an innate human trait, this is not true and our historical development plays a greater role, but we could link this back, capitalism is a human invention only possible by such actors
