Introduction

This article argues that the origin stories of mainstream criminology were originally premised on a construction of the criminal as a sub-human, a monster, an evolutionary degenerate derivative of a primitive culture or species from the global south. This fiction then subsequently embedded itself in more sophisticated, structuralist discourses that linked race, youth and masculinity to criminality, social disorganisation and the processes of modernisation impacting the large cities of the global north. Yet, the origin stories of a criminology from the global south yield a set of different theoretical and empirical questions. Finally, we offer a reinterpretation of the violence of troubled masculinities from the global south, pointing to the on-going criminogenic impact of coloniality itself. Before we do this, it is important to understand what we mean by southern criminology, the theoretical framework underpinning our argument.

Southern Criminology

Almost 85% of the world’s population live in what might be termed the ‘global south’, comprising three continents (World Population Data Set 2014 http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2014/2014-world-population-data-sheet/data-sheet.aspx). A large proportion of the world’s police and around half the world’s 10.2 million prisoners are to be found in the continents of the global south, across Asia, Africa, Oceania and South America (Walmsey 2016). These are the parts of the world that were comprehensively colonised by north Atlantic imperial powers in the course of the nineteenth century and before (Beckett 2014; Gregory 2004). Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the Global South, with important implications for south/north relations, and for global security and justice. Yet much of criminology—as a theoretical and empirical project—has overlooked the global south (Carrington et al. 2016).

It is important to acknowledge that the concept of the ‘southern’ used here is not intended as a literal geographical referent or as simply borrowing the latter-day term to describe what used to be called ‘the third world’ or the ‘developing world’. Many societies of the south, especially settler societies like Australia and New Zealand, are amongst the wealthiest countries in the world. Others, once included in the ‘third world’, are fast moving to join the ranks of high income countries. But all these countries continue to occupy a subordinate position in the global organisation of social scientific knowledge. It is also true that a north/south, colonial mentality (and often actual colonial policies and practices) existed and were sometimes pioneered, within the European world, notably in widespread discriminatory assumptions concerning southern and eastern Europeans, the Irish and other Celtic peoples, not to mention in the treatment of Indigenous populations. The fragilities of national identity and unity in some states (e.g. Italy in the late nineteenth century) focussed elite anxieties (both those of government and scientific communities), on regions, peoples and forces that they perceived to be ‘primitive’ and to threaten national identity. In all such cases, and many others, racial theories were invoked to codify, classify and explain difference as deviance and dangerous. This is to underline the fact that north/south is a highly flexible binary. Its application to exalt some people, experiences, ideas and knowledge and deprecate others is a matter of contingency and struggle (see, for example, Ignatiev 2009). And in the modern world, which has been global from the outset, these contingencies and struggles have ramified across borders as part of the (forced and unforced) movement of people, commodities, cultures and ideas. Persistent north/south tensions are a pervasive feature of the internal life of nations and regions as well as of the global relationships between them.

In Southern Theory (2007) Raewyn Connell argues that a structural imbalance in the economy of knowledge has produced a hegemony of social scientific thought based on the experience of a small number of mainly English speaking societies in the Global North. She argues that social science had succeeded in representing itself, and being widely accepted, as universal, timeless and placeless. According to this logic, social phenomena in the ‘periphery’ would be investigated from the standpoint of universal theories and laws of development generated in ‘modern’ or ‘western’ societies of the global North. The assumption was that all societies were bound to follow the lead of modern societies of the Global North if they were to successfully modernise. Connell calls this ‘metropolitan’ thinking (Connell 2007: 215). Connell’s argument applies with equal force to the field of criminology.

Mignolo, a Latino scholar from Argentina argues that there needs to be an epistemic shift to move beyond metropolitan thinking (Mignolo 2012). He believes that border epistemologies are essential ‘to delink and decolonise knowledge and, in the process, build de-colonial local histories, restoring the dignity that the Western idea of universal history took away from millions of people’ (Mignolo 2012: 10). Border thinking occurs in the spaces in between, the overlooked invisible spaces of becoming and being. Santos, a legal scholar from Portugal, also urges a complete ‘epistemological break’ from the hegemony of western thinking (Santos, 2014: 163). He argues there can be no global justice without cognitive justice. Like Connell and Mignolo, Santos is critical of the way that the history of the social sciences has projected itself as an emancipatory project yet it has not been liberating for those it has colonised, excluded or misrepresented (Santos 2014: 71). Unlike post-colonial theory, southern epistemologies do imagine a prospect for intercultural translation—– between north and south, east and west—which can produce ways of understanding that resist the universalising tendencies of western thought (Santos 2014: 212). Southern epistemologies have thus spawned a great deal of innovative new work in the social sciences which aims to bridge global divides and cross-fertilise intercultural thinking. Asian criminology (Liu 2009) and southern criminology (Carrington et al. 2016) are two such instances.

Where criminology has taken root in the global south and across Asia, South America and Australia, it has, until recently, tended to borrow and adapt metropolitan assumptions, following the social sciences more generally (Connell 2014b: 51). A specific example of this tendency is the widespread uptake of general strain theory to explain crime causation in Asian societies. A library search of peer review articles for Strain Theory, Delinquency and Asia, in the fields of social sciences, sociology and law produced an astonishing 2621 results. Agnew, the key proponent of general strain theory from North America, asserts that it “can help explain crime in Asian societies” (Agnew, 2015: 132). He does acknowledge differences between western and Asian values and cultures, but boldly insists there are enough overlapping similarities for general strain theory to explain much about crime in Asian societies (Agnew 2015: 144). Agnew draws on studies using western measures of strain in Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean communities as evidence that general strain theory applies to these societies (Agnew 2015: 136). Examples of these studies include Gao and Wong (2015); Lo et al. (2016); Lin (2012) and Moon (2008). He also suggests that as Asian societies become more like western societies in terms of embracing materialism, the sources of strain will become even more aligned with those in the west (Agnew 2015: 135). This kind of universalising is symptomatic of western-centric or metropolitan thinking. Strain theory is inherently based on a data-driven methodological individualism that is distinctively North American (Morrison 2010: 224). The assumption that strain applies to ‘the collectivistic orientation that characterizes many Asian societies’ (Agnew 2015: 144) many of whose values of family and sociality are historically rooted in Confucian traditions is a quintessential piece of metropolitan thinking.

That criminologies in the south have, until recently, accepted their subordinate role in the global organisation of knowledge (Carrington et al. 2016: 3) has stunted the intellectual development and vitality of criminology, in the South, across Asia and globally. It has also perpetuated the relative neglect of pressing criminological issues which affect both North and South. Southern criminology aims to fill this void, to transform criminological agendas to make them more befitting, inclusive of and responsive to the global problems of justice and security in the twenty-first century (Carrington et al. 2016: 2). It seeks to trans-nationalise and democratise criminological practice and knowledge, to renovate its methodological approaches and to inject innovative perspectives into the study of crime and global justice from the periphery. To be clear, however, the purpose of southern criminology is not simply to add to the growing catalogue of new criminologies. Rather, southern criminology is a theoretical, empirical and political project of redemption, aimed at bridging global divides and creating intercultural epistemologies (Carrington et al. 2016: 2).

As an empirical project, southern criminology seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the global north. It is concerned with the analysis of networks and interactions linking South and North which have been obscured by the metropolitan hegemony over criminological thought. It seeks to demonstrate that North and South are globally interconnected in ways and with effects, both historical and contemporary, which warrant inclusion in criminological research, theoretical and policy agendas. Southern criminology is also a theoretical project that seeks to generate theory and not just apply theory imported from the global north. Lastly, southern criminology is a democratising epistemology that challenges the power imbalances which have privileged knowledge produced in the metropolitan centres of the Global North. Its purpose is not to dismiss the conceptual and empirical advances that social science has produced over the last century, but to correct biases by de-colonising and democratising the toolbox of available criminological concepts, theories and methods (Carrington et al. 2016: 3). Deconstructing and reconstructing criminology’s origin stories is a crucial project for southern criminology.

Criminology’s Origin Stories

The fields of the human sciences to first study crime and deviance included moral statistics, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, craniology, phrenology, sociology and law. Importantly, the study of crime is and always has been multi-disciplinary (Garland 2011: 302). Consequently, there is no single point of origin but rather a number of origin stories. The origin stories of criminology are shaped in different, but mutually reinforcing ways, by the three main theoretical traditions in the social sciences, classicism, positivism and structuralism. The origin stories stemmed initially from the work of a number of disparate scholars from Europe and America from these diverse traditions—Lombroso, Beccaria and Durkheim, for example (Rafter 2011: 144–6). These stories privilege a set of texts and authors, most of whom were men from the Global North (see the list of 50 Key Thinkers in Criminology in Hayward, Maruna and Mooney 2010). Origin stories present ‘an individualistic picture of criminology as being shaped by a select group of geniuses rather than a messy, dynamic intellectual process characterised by collaboration and cross-fertilisation.’ (Hayward, Maruna and Mooney 2010: xxv). Also, like other social sciences, criminology and its origin stories ‘embodied an intellectual response to the colonised world’ (Connell 2007: 9). A reckoning with this fact should be central to any attempt to account for the development and present state of the field.

The origin stories of criminology as a science of individual criminal difference began with the biological accounts of the born criminal commonly associated with the work of Cesare Lombroso, a Professor in Legal Medicine at the University of Turin, Italy, in the late nineteenth century. Over two decades Lombroso and his associates undertook an ambitious research program measuring, classifying and recording their observations of thousands of prison inmates (Lombroso 1876, 1918). While there are abundant critiques of his methods and theories which need no rehearsing here, the one of central importance to our argument is that his theory of atavism was founded on observations of prisoners mainly from the poorer parts of southern Italy (Bradley 2010: 28). Atavism was linked with the idea of the southern from the outset, as Bradley explains.

‘The southern regions of Italy suffered from high levels of economic deprivation, and thus Southern Italians accounted for a high proportion of the Italian prison population. There were also powerful cultural connotations of the South with crime and atavism… The south was seen as backward and uncivilised’ (Bradley, 2010: 28).

Lombroso was influenced, as were many intellectuals at the time, by Darwin’s evolutionary theory (1839), and in particular, the social Darwinian theories erected by others with limited regard for Darwin’s own positions (Bradley 2010: 25). Social Darwinism was a centre-piece of metropolitan thought which assumed that the developing/industrialising world which was then exerting its power over the globe provided the standard of modernisation and the model of civilisation validated by doctrines of natural selection. Nature decreed that others should follow if they were to survive and prosper. Social evolutionism ‘naturalised global difference’ (Connell 2007: 17) justifying the imperial domination of the northern empires over the global south. In evolutionary theory, the European spaces of modernity were represented as disciplined, measured, hierarchical and inhabited by rational actors (Gregory, 2004: 3). Modernity’s other—the pre-modern—were represented as the ‘primitive, wild, and corporeal, mysterious, capricious, and excessive; or as irregular, multiple, and labyrinthine’ (Gregory 2004: 3–4).

Mimicking the evolutionary methods of Charles Darwin (1839), Lombroso collected a great many specimens of what he assumed to be the ‘atavistic stigma’ from the ‘oriental’ and ‘primitive cultures’ of Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The specimens, photos and objects are archived today in the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin, Italy. Lombroso contrasted these specimens with his observations of prisoners, most of whom just happened to be the ‘darker’, ‘hairier’ and muscular men from southern Italy. Comparisons drawn were then deployed as evidence of evolution from the uncivilised (largely southern) to the civilised (largely northern) world. In effect, Lombroso was measuring the cranial and biological features of male prisoners from southern Italy, which he compared with the prototype atavistic male specimens taken from Asia and the global south (Horn 2003: 43–51).

The idea that the criminal was a monster, an evolutionary degenerate from a primitive culture or species was therefore one of the central origins stories of criminology. ‘Criminals were gothic monsters, strangers among the civilised’ (Rafter 2011:151). This Lombrosian idea translated into a twentieth century criminal science that continued to link criminality with certain bodies. As David Horn described it, ‘Claims about the atavistic nature of criminality were dependent…not only on evolutionary and national narratives, but also on generative analogies that linked the bodies and behaviours of criminals, animals, children, savages, and women’ (2003: 25–26). In the closely related nineteenth century theory of recapitulation, the development of the individual was posited as repeating the stages of evolutionary development of their ancestors. Thus, white children develop beyond an intellectual stage in which the adults of inferior races are trapped. Or, as Herbert Spencer put it, ‘the intellectual traits of the uncivilized…are traits recurring in the children of the civilized’ (cited in Gould 1980: 217).

A library search of peer reviewed articles on race and criminology, just in the fields of law, social sciences and sociology, undertaken while researching this article, produced an astonishing 15,613 results. The uncritical operationalization of ‘race’ as a taken for granted variable in crime causation in quantitative criminology accounts for the majority of these articles. A meta-analysis of the extant literature on race and crime undertaken by Walsh and Yun observed that ‘Race is considered a major correlate of criminal behaviour’ (Walsh and Yun 2011: 1279). Their survey of the literature concluded that ‘Studies have consistently found that wherever the three major races coexist, the pattern of offending, particularly violent offending, is invariably black > white > Asian’ (Walsh and Yun 2011: 1219). Genetic science is invoked in this large body of literature to argue that population gene pools are correlated with race, testosterone levels and hence violence. This analysis inferiorises Asian manliness as lacking, while naturalising violence among young working class and/or black men as something which they are simply ‘drawn to’ (Tomsen 2007: 94). Images and assumptions regarding the traits held to be innate to non-white races—impulsiveness, lack of self-control, emotionalism, violent propensities, immorality, idleness and so on—were readily attributed to others, like young men, especially young men from the ‘lower’ classes and certain racial and ethnic minorities, as a phase in their development that explained their greater propensity for crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990). The theoretical elaboration of, and ‘scientific’ validation for, such claims may have become more sophisticated as nineteenth century racial science became thoroughly discredited, but the core underlying assumptions remain to a surprising degree intact. They continue to underpin the focal concerns of criminal justice and control institutions and the principal theoretical and empirical agendas of a great deal of mainstream criminology, to the substantial exclusion of what others might see as dangerous subjects more worthy of criminological attention (i.e. white corporate criminals).

The modernisation thesis, derivative of sociological structuralism, is another key plank in criminology’s origin stories. Key concepts such as anomie, social control and social disorganisation, emblematic in the work of Emile Durkheim (1896), were central to the modernisation thesis (Young 2010:91). Widely influential in the social sciences over the last century, this thesis links historical processes of industrialisation and urbanisation as presenting key problems for the maintenance of social order (Nisbet 1970). Social problems of crime, delinquency and violence were thought to be predominantly modern urban phenomena produced by the erosion of community and extended family structures and the demise of traditional forms of social solidarity that exerted informal social controls.

The most famous and enduring works of this kind of sociological theorising in the field of criminology emerged from the Chicago School of Sociology between 1920 and 1945. Chicago had undergone rapid population growth from under 5000 in 1840 to 1.7 million by the turn of the twentieth century, surging to 3.4 million people during the 1920s (Bulmer 1984: 13). The city, like many other American cities, had experienced waves of migration, with over half of its population born outside the USA including a sizable immigrant community from southern Italy. Hence, the city provided an ideal social laboratory for the study of crime, disorder, race and delinquency. Significant works published by the Chicago School include Shaw’s The Natural History of a Delinquent Career (1931), The Jackroller (1930), and (with McKay) Juvenile Delinquency & Urban Areas (1931). Descended from the Chicago tradition, although undertaken in Boston, Whyte’s (1993) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum documented the life histories of Doc and Chic which he combined with rich ethnographic observations of the immigrant Italian families of Cornerville. Equally significant and influential, Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys, describes the delinquent as the quintessential ‘rough male’ (Cohen 1955: 140). Cohen too drew on disorganisation theory and the concept of cultural transmission—developed by the Chicago School—to explain why the delinquent gang was the central sociological vehicle for the transmission of male delinquency among working class boys unable to attain the American Dream. While all these studies have made an enduring impact on the origin stories of criminology, and are in themselves fine pieces of research, they nevertheless bear the heavy foot-print of a form of sociological theorising centred on how unruly young men, mostly of immigrant and lower class backgrounds, formed subcultures of delinquency which posed significant problems for maintaining social order in the growing cities of the global north.

The assumption underpinning this large program of research was that rapid population growth, social disorganisation and weakened social controls produced higher crime rates (Levin & Lindesmith 1937). Social disorganisation theory, with its focus on urbanisation, became something of an article of faith in much of twentieth century criminology (i.e. Nisbet 1970; Baldwin and Bottoms 1976: 1; Felson 1994). The theory was generalised, and its provenance in a particular place and time widely overlooked. While the modernisation thesis may capture the impact of nineteenth century industrialisation on social order in the sprawling cities of the global north, like Chicago, it ignores the dramatic impacts of industrial capitalism on the reconstruction of the global countryside (i.e. Harkness et al. 2015; Hogg and Carrington 2006; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2013; Barclay et al. 2007). It also overlooks how patterns of crime and violence emerge outside the metropole, especially in rural contexts, the developing world, fragile states and contested border zones.

Classicism is the last of the origin stories of criminology that underpin its northern-centrism. Classical western conceptions of state and society, both liberal and otherwise, permeated what was retrospectively constructed as the classical criminology associated with thinkers like Beccaria, Bentham and others. Premised on a Hobbesian framework (Hogg 2002: 192), it is assumed that a strong central state is essential to maintain social order, and to avoid anomie and the bloodshed of civil war (Braithwaite and Wardak, 2013). For Hobbes, the fundamental historical pre-condition for the rise of the modern ‘criminal justice state’ and ‘rule of law’ was the formation of sovereign territorial states (Hogg 2002). Individuals entered a social contract, surrendering their right to violence to a central state authority in return for peace, order and state protection. Referring to Hobbes’ theory of the social contract, Santos observes, ‘What they say is that modern individuals, that is, metropolitan men, enter the social contract in order to abandon the state of nature to form civil society’ (Santos, 2014: 122). In effect, this meant that millions of ‘native’ peoples were excluded from the social contract by being defined as belonging to the state of nature. Indeed, Hobbes explicitly referred to native peoples of America as ‘savages’ and exemplars of nature (Hobbes in Santos 2014: 122), assumptions that pervaded the philosophy even of celebrated nineteenth liberals like John Stuart Mill (Mill 1993: 79). These assumptions justified imperialism and the exclusion of indigenous peoples and non-white races from the social contract across the global south. In Australia, the continent was characterised as terra nullius (empty) by its British colonisers, and its original inhabitants were treated as merely part of the flora and fauna (Goodall 1996). These forms of empire building were not confined to the global south. Native Indians in the Americas for example were dispossessed and colonised by European imperial powers.

Taking the rule of law and a high level of internal peace for granted, criminology rarely inquired into how these regulatory states were brought about in different historical and geo-political settings. What logically followed was that criminology largely became a peace-time endeavour, narrowing its gaze to crimes and violence within the boundaries of pacified domestic nation states (Barberet 2014: 16), with a few significant exceptions mostly dating from the recent past and linked to critical traditions of scholarship in criminology (Ass 2011; Bowling 2011; Barberet 2014; Hogg 2002; Walklate and McGarry 2015; Braithwaite and Wardak 2013, Green and Ward 2009). The narrowing of the criminological gaze to a domestic context overlooks the criminogenic impact of colonialism itself on historical and contemporary patterns of crime and criminalisation (Carrington et al. 2016: 3). In what follows, we attempt to theorise how the violence of coloniality has impacted socio-historically on the formation of troubled masculinities and patterns of gendered violence in the global south. But first, we consider how at least one part of this experience might have yielded different origin stories if its southern provenance had not disqualified it from criminological interest and theoretical elaboration.

Southern Stories and Other Criminologies

The European colonisation of the Australian continent might be expected to be of special interest to criminology, for it was a rather unique experiment in the use of convicted criminals to build a new society. In the 80-year period between 1788 and 1868, Britain transported 160,000 convicts to its colonies in Australia, primarily New South Wales (NSW), Van Diemen’s Land (VDL, or what later became Tasmania) and Western Australia. These remote locations on the Australian continent, a world away from the British Isles, were colonised as places of exile for criminals convicted in British courts at a time when no national prison system existed in Britain to accommodate them, and older penal measures (the death penalty and other corporal punishments) were falling into disrepute.

The Australian penal colonial experience is only one of many instances used by European powers of penal transportation as an instrument of imperial statecraft in the early modern and modern world. For two centuries before the American Revolution, Britain transported convicts to its North American colonies (Ekirch 1987). Britain also sent convicts to Bermuda (1824–1863), Gibraltar (1842–1875), the Falklands (1826–1831) and British Guyana. Convicts were transported from British India to its Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, Penang) between 1797 and 1867 and to the Andaman Islands between 1858 and 1910. Other European imperial states also used transportation as a penal measure. The French sent convicts to French Guyana (some 80,000 between 1852 and 1938) and New Caledonia in the south Pacific (some 22,000 between 1864 and 1897). Transportation was employed by the Spanish to Cuba, Mexico, Philippines and Morocco. In both tsarist and Soviet eras, Russia relied heavily on internal political exile to Siberia, but in addition, it transported about 180,000 convicts to Sakhalin Island in the Pacific between 1850 and 1917 (Baskerville 2011: 84–87; Australian Government, 2008: 101–111). The dimensions of penal transportation, the varieties of regimes and their impacts on economy and society in different settings are only now attracting the attention they deserve, although principally from academics in history and other fields rather than criminologyFootnote 1 (Anderson et al. 2015).

By any measure, this historical penal enterprise linking north and south is of more than passing significance also for criminology, but it has attracted scant attention from within its ranks, especially when compared to the vast scholarship devoted to the prison and other forms of punishment. We do not set out to in any way rectify that omission here but only offer some brief reflections on the implications of transportation in light of the above account of criminology’s origin stories.

In this respect, the Australian experience is of particular importance, for convicts sent to Australia were not transported to an existing colony where their labour might be exploited or simply exiled, as was the case in many other places, but, more radically, the British colonies of NSW and VDL were founded as penal colonies in which the labour of convicted criminals was used to build a new society (Hirst 1998). In its origins, conception and expectations for its development it was to be a penal society, a more or less self-sustaining community, and one which could only be established with the labour of the offenders as much or more than their gaolers. This almost inevitably was to lead to some blurring of the distinction between convict and free settler in the new society and require that large numbers of the former would have to assume many of the ordinary responsibilities and rights of citizens, in short, that the new society would not remain simply a penal colony for long. But what sort of society would take shape under these peculiar conditions?

The transplanting to a faraway, alien environment of a youthful, predominantly male population selected on the basis of their criminal propensities could hardly have been regarded as offering much promise for the society that would emerge. Ordinary processes of family and community formation were extremely limited for, quite apart from anything else, women constituted no more than 15% of the convict population. Unsurprisingly, transportation attracted its share of savage critics among reformers like Jeremy Bentham and his followers. Dire predictions were made as to the inevitable moral and social fate of the new society: a ‘thief colony’, once established, was destined to remain as such, permanently polluted by the criminality of its members. And this view was absorbed by large and influential sections of the later colonial population who mounted popular campaigns for the cessation of transportation and for measures to exclude convicts and emancipists. With the end of transportation, there were concerted efforts to erase all memory of the convict era, the ‘convict stain’ as it was known (Smith 2008). Even many later historians had their interpretations of the period coloured by the image that had been promoted in Britain, and was widely shared in official and popular opinion in Australia, that convict society had been a sinkhole of moral depravity populated by irredeemable criminals. Anxieties surrounding the convict past also influenced later notoriously restrictive immigration policies that Australia pioneered in the early twentieth century. Only in more recent revisionist accounts do we find antidotes to these understandings, accounts that stress the role of convicts as workers, as settlers and as nation builders (e.g. Nicholas 1988; Hirst 1983, 1998; Hughes 1988; Boyce 2008).

In both NSW and VDL (now Tasmania) for the first 50 years of the nineteenth century, convicts and their descendants constituted the major component of population, the principal source of labour and, directly and indirectly, a major driver of economic development through the opening up of the interior and the establishment of a pastoral industry (Boyce, 2008 2013). Transportation to NSW ceased in 1840, and the following decade saw a large influx of free settlers drawn to eastern mainland Australia by the discovery of gold, thus reducing the relative demographic significance of former convicts and convict-descendants in the mainland population. Yet, as of mid-century, convicts and ex-convicts constituted 20% of the NSW adult male population and together with their descendants a significantly bigger proportion than that. Yet, in defiance of what critics of the ‘thief colony’ predicted for this substantially convict-descended society, NSW in the second half of the nineteenth century rapidly developed into a relatively stable, prosperous, democratic and egalitarian community. Official crime data of the period obviously has serious limitations, but the indications are that crime rates underwent steep declines in the second third of the century (Braithwaite, 2001).

VDL (Tasmania) appears even more remarkable in this respect. It did not undergo the same demographic expansion as NSW, and those transported there over the previous 50 years (over 70,000 convicts) and their descendants always constituted a much larger proportion of the colony’s population. In 1851, 75% of its adult male population were convicts or ex-convicts (Boyce 2008: 224–225); thus, convicts, emancipists and their descendants formed a major component of the Tasmanian population for generations after transportation ended. Based on a recent poll, it has been estimated that more than a third of Tasmania’s population today have convict ancestry (Alexander 2014: 4). Tasmania is unquestionably a convict-descended society. Again, however, Tasmania’s crime rate declined even more rapidly and to lower levels than that of NSW in the second half of the nineteenth century and by century’s end, it had the lowest crime rate by a significant margin of any of the eastern Australian states (Braithwaite 2001: 36).

At the time Lombroso and his colleagues were founding a new science of criminal difference centred on categories like the ‘born criminal’ and the ‘habitual criminal’ and policy debates were dominated by the related problem of recidivism (see Report from the Departmental Committee on Prisons (Gladstone Committee Report) (1895), UK; Simon 1996), the recent Australian convict experience might have been looked upon as a huge natural criminological experiment useful for testing new ideas (Hughes 1988: xiii). If the late nineteenth century crime problem had been viewed through the lens of the global south, antipodean experience the questions posed by the new discipline and registered in policy controversies might have been very different, not what creates born criminals and what can be done to combat recidivism, and how a hand-picked criminal class and its descendants came to be substantially ‘rehabilitated’ and socially integrated into an economically prosperous and democratic society with relatively low crime rates.

In the conditions pertaining in the Australian penal colony, it was no doubt some combination of necessity, improvisation and chance, as well at times as conscious administrative purpose, that produced these outcomes. But the enduring lesson is that, notwithstanding the undoubted pains of exile and hardships of convict life, when afforded opportunities that would have been denied all or most of them in their countries of origin, so many convicts and their families built viable lives away from crime and poverty. (There are now a growing number of studies that document these patterns for different groups of convicts: Smith 2014; Frost 2015; Kavanagh and Snowden 2015). It is an experience in which we see penal policy and practice concretely connected into the economic and social structures of society in ways that (as Braithwaite (2001) stressed) proved to be inclusionary for many. It is an experience—from the south—that may have yielded very different ways of thinking about crime and a very different set of origin stories for criminology from those which so profoundly shaped its (northern) theoretical trajectory in the twentieth century. But, like slavery, the violent expropriation of indigenous people and colonialism itself, convict transportation is acknowledged as fact, but rather immediately thereafter consigned to the margins of history and thought, a prelude only to the ‘normal’ development of economy and society.

Of course, there is another side—a terrible underside—to the Australian experience. Many transported white convict men and women and their descendants may have been saved from a life of crime and poverty by seizing the opportunities to make viable lives that were available in the very different economic and social conditions prevailing in the colonies; in particular, these opportunities stemmed from what was seen as the abundance of land. The problem was: it was someone else’s land. The possibilities of inclusion, and of new freedoms, depended on the violent dispossession of others. At the end of the long chain of displacements and migrations that produced convict Australia, Indigenous Australians paid the highest price. Their land provided the bounty of opportunity seized by white settlers, convict and free. Violent dispossession left Indigenous Australians with few options or resources for cultural adaptation and re-building and caused them to become the targets of the most intense segregationist efforts, penal and otherwise, which continue to manifest in catastrophically high imprisonment rates. Formerly enslaved and Indigenous people are over-represented almost everywhere in the criminal justice systems of settler societies like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, North and South America (Cunneen 2011). We only have space to take one example, that of Australia.

‘the Other Side of the Frontier’: the Violence of Coloniality

Violence played a key role in the British colonisation of Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a continent the colonisers fictitiously deemed as terra nullius (empty), by defining its original human inhabitants as part of the flora and fauna (Goodall 1996). It took almost 200 years for Indigenous Australians to be formally recognised as citizens in the Australian constitution through a 1967 referendum. Before that, they were excluded on missions and reserves and on the fringes of outback towns where virtually all aspects of their lives were administered under ‘protection’ or ‘welfare’ laws (McCorquodale 1997). Colonisation involved dispossession, mass killings, forced segregation, vigilantism and a variety of forms of discriminatory and oppressive administrative action (Cowlishaw 2004; Reynolds 1989; Attwood and Foster 2003). The legacies of colonisation and frontier violence reach into the present, through inter-generational trauma and loss, adversely impacting on indigenous health and wellbeing in myriad ways (AIHW 2013). They are reflected in extreme levels of familial and communal violence and massive day-to-day contact with the criminal justice system (Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence 2000; Al-Yaman et al. 2006; Cunneen 2001; Hogg and Carrington 2006).

While the Indigenous population is around 3%, they represent ‘just over one quarter (27%) of the total prisoner population’ (ABS 2013). This means that nationally Indigenous Australians are over-represented in adult prisons by fifteen times relative to their population, though the extent varies by jurisdiction (ABS 2013). The levels of over-representation for Indigenous youth in detention, at 24 times that of non-Indigenous youth, are even more catastrophic (AIHW 2012). Indigenous peoples are also more likely to be the victims of violence. The homicide victimisation rate fluctuates, but is around six times higher for Indigenous as compared with non-Indigenous Australians (Mouzos 2001: 2). The rate of Indigenous women who experience domestic violence is also significantly higher (Memmott et al. 2001, Al-Yaman et al. 2006; Wundersitz 2010). Finally, child abuse is almost eight times the average for Indigenous compared to non-Indigenous children (AIHW 2013: 24).

This bleak statistical picture of the over-representation of Indigenous Australians as both victims and perpetrators of crime and violence has to be seen in light of a number of caveats. First, while the overwhelming majority of non-Indigenous Australians live in metropolitan cities (88%), almost half (46%) of Indigenous Australians reside in regional or remote Australia (AIHW 2010), where violence is higher for everyone. Violence is not just an Indigenous issue in the global countryside but one intricately overlayed with distinctive features of rural life and anomic aspects of contemporary global capitalism, including serious population, economic and employment decline that has had its most severe impacts on the Indigenous population who have always constituted the most marginal sector of the rural labour force (Hogg and Carrington 2006; Carrington and Scott 2008). Secondly, these same factors, along with the retrenchment of public services by neo-liberal government, have eroded the social infrastructure of rural communities, providing fewer of the supports that might keep people from offending and/or provide more effective alternatives to incarceration when they do (Hogg and Carrington 2006). Finally, where Australian cities are racially, ethnically and culturally diverse, rural areas tend towards a White Anglo/Black Indigenous racial bi-polarity in which historical and contemporary tensions remain just below the surface when they are not on overt display (see Hogg and Carrington 2006: 79–96; Cowlishaw 2004; Cunneen 2001). This feeds a cycle of law and order demands for ‘crack-downs’ and the criminalisation of black youth, in ways similar to the over-policing of urban black lives in the USA (Currie, 2017). So the violence of coloniality and its criminogenic legacies should be central to the origins stories of criminology, not only in the global south, but in the northern hemisphere where contemporary patterns of criminalisation of racialised groups are also embedded in stories of slavery and transportation.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that there is no single origin story underpinning the disparate field of criminology. Lombroso’s positivist method created a prototype of the criminal body based on specimens of ‘atavism’ from the ‘native’ peoples of the global south. This fiction then subsequently embedded itself in more sophisticated, structuralist discourses that linked race, youth and masculinity to criminality, social disorganisation and the processes of modernisation impacting the large cities of the Global North. The bulk of theorising about masculinity, crime and violence in the twentieth century then came to settle upon the petty delinquencies of poor, young immigrant men, living in the ghettos of the cities of the global north. The domestic gaze of peacetime criminology (derivative of the influence of classism) overlooked the criminogenic impact of colonialism on the diverse societies of the global south. In sum, the majority of criminological studies in the twentieth century came to focus upon the petty delinquencies of young men (the monsters within) from the social margins, mostly from poor, ethnic and immigrant backgrounds living on the periphery of global cities from the north. Much of mainstream criminology then devoted disproportionate attention to the more efficient measurement and management of these problems (perfecting crime statistics, surveys and the like) (see Carrington et al. 2016: 6–7).

Yet, the origin stories of a criminology from the global south yield a set of different theoretical and empirical questions. First, how is it, that a penal colony, created by Britain’s use of convictism and transportation to Australia, did not lead to the birth of a criminal class or nation, as Lombroso and his followers may have predicted, and many from the Global North feared? Questions posed from this antipodean experience are not about what creates born criminals but rather what can be done to combat recidivism, assist rehabilitation and reintegration into mainstream economic and social life. The national historiography on the convict period is substantial, but more recent work has begun to explore convict lives in close detail and the impact of the convict system on social, economic and other outcomes for convicts and their families as well as for the wider societies that took shape within the shell of penal colonies (see the Founders and Survivors project: http://foundersandsurvivors.org). Many prospered and the fears of breeding criminal classes were completely unfounded. There is much more to be discovered here that criminology should be keenly interested in.

Secondly, what enduring criminogenic legacies did the violence of coloniality have for those dispossessed by the expropriation of their lands? Post-colonial criminology has made some headway in furthering the understanding of the historical impact of colonial and imperial practices on the over-representation of Indigenous and enslaved peoples in current criminal justice systems in settler societies, such as Australia, the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia (Cunneen 2011: 250–1). Post-colonial perspectives in criminology certainly widen the analysis ‘between race and criminalisation, the development of identities of resistance, and various processes of transformative justice’ (Cunneen 2011: 263). But the biological classification of human beings according to race or indigenous status is itself a colonising discourse. Since the colonisation of Australia, there have been no less than 67 classifications, descriptions or definitions of aboriginality in colonial and Australian laws (McCorquodale 1997: 24). At the heart of these colonialist definitions of indigenous peoples is a biologically reductionist legal personality that has been variously constructed in terms of colour, ‘blood quantum’, ‘race’ and genealogical ‘descent’ (Chalmers 2013/14; Gardiner-Garden 2003; McCorquodale 1997; Brown 2014). These definitions of aboriginality falsely unify hundreds of Indigenous nations, thereby producing the present-day fiction that there is a singular Aboriginal (legal) identity (Chalmers 2013/14: 50). Chalmers argues that such categorisations were never part of the local languages, customary practices or laws of first nation peoples of Australia (Chalmers 2013/14: 51). Hence post-colonial perspectives in criminology, where they romanticise or essentialise ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ peoples as racialised identities, reproduce the functional dualisms of northern epistemology, albeit unwittingly. Consequently, one of the differences between post-colonial theory and southern theory is that the latter avoids the essentialisation and romanticisation of the concept of indigenous. This shift is vital if we are to inquire into uncomfortable questions about the inter-generational impact of the violence of coloniality.

Lastly, what has been the criminogenic impact of the coloniality on masculinity and gendered violence? Connell argues it is vital to comprehend the coloniality of gender—how the social and historical making of masculinities were shaped by legacies of colonialism (Connell, 2014a). At present, most theorising about gender, crime and violence in the global organisation of knowledge has come from the northern metropoles where most journals, conferences and universities are located. Yet, as Connell reminds us theory, research agendas and innovations can be generated from the specific experiences of global south, and northern thinking can be cross-fertilised by it in a way that enhances the global epistemology (Connell 2014a). For those countries in the global south colonised by the European and northern powers, ‘The process and settlement was itself a site for the creation of masculinities’ (Connell, 2014a: 8). These masculinities remain deeply troubled by the legacies of colonialism that not only transformed the global countryside and created new trade routes which extended the reach of market economies, but radically transformed gender relations in the process, disrupted hierarchies of power between groups of men, dislodging customary forms of control and authority (Beneria 2003). In the contemporary world, globalising cultural forces have increasingly destabilised traditional constructs of gender, exacerbating men’s loss of patriarchal control over women as wives and co-workers especially (Connell 2014a). Gendered violence in this context can sometimes be a form of compensation for losing power (Hautzinger 2003: 93), a reaction to loss of patriarchal control, rather than an assertion of it (Carrington and Scott 2008).

The coloniality of gendered violence occurs on the periphery, in geo-political spaces suspended from the norms of peace, the rule of law, the Hobbesan triangle of state, law and justice. In these zones of exclusion and suspension, gendered hierarchies are de-stabilised producing threatened masculinities, sometimes attracted to the use of violence as a method to re-subjugate women, re-assert their dominance, or compensate for a sense of loss (Carrington and Scott 2008). Sometimes they inflict abhorrent gendered violence but are also sometimes themselves subject to brutal state violence and excessive criminalisation. This is a dynamic evident in communities shaped by a coloniality of gender where violence has become inter-generational, such as in some Indigenous communities, and other parts of the globe undergoing mass dislocation after a period of colonisation (i.e. anomic trade zones and war zones of the Middle East and Central America). We have only begun to comprehend the tragedy of this dynamic of gendered violence in the former colonies of the global south, let alone learn how to undo it.