Abstract
This chapter focuses on the exploration of the assumption by Steven Box, (Power, Crime and Mystification, Tavistock, London, 1983, hereafter, PCM) that power and not powerlessness is a major cause of crime. The chapter starts by revisiting an earlier debate by Box and Ford (Sociological Review 19:31–52, 1971) as a background to understanding the importance of the original contribution to knowledge made by Box (PCM ower). A reading of Chapter One of PCM shows that Box understood the importance of including crimes by states especially in formerly colonized countries under imperialism today, indirectly calling for decolonization struggles to carry on. The issues about PCM in relation to colonialism and state violence have, to the best of our knowledge, not been developed in the depth that they should be. So the chapter develops the following themes: in what ways could Box’s thesis be applied to the crimes and social harms of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, internal colonialism and neocolonialism; how have these crimes been mystified, what about the nature of the power exercised by the rapacious colonial state in alliance with imperialist corporations and how can a Counter-Colonial Criminology (Agozino, 2003) be utilized to contest/resist the mystification process Box identified so powerfully 40 years ago?
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Notes
- 1.
Although the population of women in prisons globally has increased by 60% from the year 2000 to 2022, it has been reported by the World Prison Brief that: ‘Women and girls make up 6.9% of the global prison population. In African countries, the proportion of female prisoners is 3.3%, compared to 5.9% in Europe, 6.7% in Oceania, 7.2% in Asia, and 8.0% in the Americas’. https://www.prisonstudies.org/news/world-female-prison-population-60-2000#:~:text=Women%20and%20girls%20make%20up,and%208.0%25%20in%20the%20Americas. (Accessed 04/24/2003).
- 2.
Left realism was a perspective in critical criminology that emerged in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It was intended to engage more directly with Labour Party politics. Its influence in criminology substantially declined after the late 1990s.
- 3.
“On Mr. Wilson: His role as their true enemy was as clear as Lyndon Johnson’s role in Vietnam. He had placed his Government fully at the service of the lust of British Shell and British Petroleum for the great Biafran oilfields, which produced crude oil so pure it can be used directly in diesel engines. The Ibos, who made up nine million of Biafra’s pre war population of 14 million—five times the population of Ireland then, but perhaps only three times Ireland’s now—were the people whom the English could never control in Colonial days. Mr. Wilson’s goal was neocolonialism for Nigeria, a condition, I may add, that one sees in other presumably independent African countries. There, at the first sign of an administrative complication, from immigration procedures to hotel bills, a white man materializes to straighten things out. As long as their lanterns burned, this never happened in Biafra. But it was estimated that as many as 20 official missions—trade, sanitation and so on—had been sent to Nigeria from London in 1969.” https://www.nytimes.com/1970/01/25/archives/an-epitaph-for-biafra-an-epitaph-for-biafra.html. (Accessed on 04/24/2023).
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“In 2002, the Khulumani Support Group for victims of Apartheid brought a suit against five corporations for providing infrastructure to South Africa’s Apartheid regime. The case also used the Alien Tort Claims Act that allows non-US citizens to charge offenders of human rights. Again, the ATCA has been criticized by corporations, and the Act’s relevance is now under review in the United States Supreme Court. The South African President Zuma approved of the lawsuit, ‘hoping that reparations would help South Africa come to terms with the apartheid’s legacy’” (Rothe and Kauzlarich 2016: 187).
- 7.
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Agozino, B. (2023). Standing on the Shoulders of a Criminological Giant: Steven Box and the Question of Counter-Colonial Criminology. In: Scott, D.G., Sim, J. (eds) Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46213-9_17
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