This paper examines the structural relations that lead to People of Colour being disproportionately affected by custody deaths in England and Wales. It surveys injustices past and present in considering the role of colonialism and imperialism in perpetuating this disproportionality. The paper uses the concepts of structural violence and necropolitics as ways of conceptualising the ongoing victimisation and oppression of People of Colour by the criminal justice system in England and Wales. It considers the discourse around these deaths, arguing that narratives constructed about People of Colour who die in custody reflect their relative value to the society in which they lived. That whilst such deaths are often constructed as individual ‘tragedies’ they in fact result from systemic and structural relations that reflect the inevitability of People of Colour dying in disproportionate numbers.

Over the past decade, there has been increasing calls for criminology to move beyond a global north perspective. Southern and Asian criminologies, for example, are gaining momentum, questioning grand theorizing and knowledge production. Decolonizing criminology has also emerged as part of these larger debates, especially the lasting impact of colonialism on historical and contemporary policies and practices in the core and peripheries (Aliverti et al., 2021). This paper builds on these efforts to decolonize criminology, focusing specifically on the colonial legacy of Hong Kong’s anti-drugs policies. We argue that in order to understand the current dilemmas of its drug policies, one must trace its colonial roots. Despite changes in the market – consumer preferences and characteristics – Hong Kong’s drug policies has shown continuity, remaining firmly embedded in its colonial origins. We begin with an overview of the British empire’s monopoly over the distribution and retail sales of opium in the colony and the suppression of competing drugs in the market. With increasing international pressures alongside growing competition from “illegal” markets in opium and heroin, and an increasingly visible heroin “problem”, colonial authorities initiated its prohibitionist campaign. We then move forward to the present, to examine how the campaign has continued unabated nearly nine decades later despite calls for the integration of harm reduction – a health centered approach. In doing so, we draw on our current fieldwork with people who use drugs and frontline workers to reflect on the constraints and challenges of working within the current policy paradigm.

In Canada, Indigenous persons are often referred to as “welfare sippers,” “lazy,” “substance-addicted,” “unintelligent,” and “undeserving.” These offensive terms have a common meaning; they allude to a contradiction of the capitalist ethos, according to which people must uphold a specific type of entrepreneurism, work ethics, sobriety, assertiveness, worthiness, and intelligence and display a specific type of wealth. Our project explores the origins of such discursive formations and identifies and exposes the colonial policies and practices that manufactured indigeneity as deviant and, often, criminal in Canada. We demonstrate that the categorization of Indigenous bodies, cultures, and indigeneity as deviant stems from Indigenous resistance to the colonial effort aimed at transforming Indigenous people into wage workers and building an Indigenous working class in the country. Our project analyzes the Annual Reports of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs between 1880 and 1936 to identify and expose the oppressive practices, technologies, and discourses used to expand capitalist economies in the country. We focus on the regime of oppression and subordination imposed on the Indigenous peoples to micro-manage their lives and force them to leave their ways of living (e.g., nomadism, hunting, gathering, and traditions) to embrace farming, wage labour, and European ways of living and values. While most studies on Canadian colonialism frame the social-cultural destruction resulting from colonial institutions, like the residential or boarding school systems, as a colonist goal, our study innovates by shifting the angle of analysis to the expansion of capitalism and its perversity. We assert that the cultural genocide (i.e., removal of the practices and structures for a population to exist) articulated by colonial institutions was a means to a larger and long-lasting goal, which was to implement a capitalist mode of production in Canada. Our project contributes to a historical understanding of the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in social problems ranging from homelessness and unemployment to criminality and incarceration.

This paper frames the adultification of Black boys within a culture of policing and surveillance in ‘the green unpleasant land’ (Fowler, 2020) of Wellingborough in the East Midlands during the 70s and 80s.

When the Swansgate Centre (previously Arndale) was built in the early 70s, it became a hangout spot for many teenaged Black Caribbean boys. Centre management and security also often entrapped these boys for crimes they did not commit. At school, many of them (especially new arrivals), were also labelled in the pervading racist logics of ‘subnormal’ [ESN] – a term that ‘rocked’ the establishment when Bernard Coard (1971) evidence how government policymaking was responsible for tying race with intelligence having a disproportionate impact on Caribbean children. Likewise, was happening in Wellingborough.

Around these pervading discourses local educationalists, social workers, legal professionals, and political activists among others, united to hold police and schools to account. With many Caribbean elders arriving in England with colonial mindsets as well, the work of local activists was met with resistance ‘from the inside’ when Black youths were acquitted for the crimes they were being ‘fitted up’ for in the Arndale Centre. The internalised anti-Blackness from some Caribbean elders pervaded in their want to weaponise the police and the courts system against Black youngsters.

Focusing on the young people whose Caribbean parents settled in Wellingborough, this paper highlights notions of surveillance and overpolicing used by local institutions to do to harm – worsened by respectability politics and internalised anti-Blackness within Wellingborough’s Black community during the 70s and 80s. This paper is one story of a wider Creative Writing PhD about post-war Caribbean Northants – based on 100+ oral history testimonies and limited secondary sources, including local news media. It aims to offer alternative epistemologies of postwar Black Britain outside of major English cities.