Ten percent of the world’s population lives on islands, but until now the place and space characteristics of islands in criminological theory have not been deeply considered. This book moves beyond the question of whether islands have more, or less, crime than other places, and instead addresses issues of how, and by whom, crime is defined in island settings, which crimes are policed and visible, and who is subject to regulation. These questions are informed by ‘the politics of place and belonging’ and the distinctive social networks and normative structures of island communities.
criminological issues. We have attempted to compensate for this here and have been less concerned with how criminology might solve social problems, including crime, instead largely focusing on how such problems are generated and, indeed, how criminology itself has constructed such problems. In this way we view island criminologies as being as much about problem analysis as they are about problem solving ( Schneider, 1985 ). At any rate, we have endeavoured here to draw upon a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to map island criminologies. It is
their work adopted interpretive and critical approaches that interrogate how crime problems are constructed in the countryside and who constructs such visions of crime in rural contexts. Even when accounting for this turn, islands remain largely invisible in the context of rural criminology. We also draw on fictional accounts of islands and crime and attempt to provide some foundations for an interpretive or cultural approach to island criminologies. In doing so, we extend the concept of ‘islandness’, which has significantly informed island studies, to account for
criminological theorizing across these areas. In the chapter immediately following ( Chapter 2 ), we spend some time setting out a place for island criminologies within the broader context of Southern and decolonizing criminologies. This chapter serves as something of a ‘literature review’, though we do not claim to be systematic or comprehensive in our presentation of relevant literature, choosing, rather, samples representative of the type of criminological research that has been conducted to date around islands. Drawing on spatial and place-based criminologies, we discuss
(island) criminology. To conclude the chapter, we briefly consider alternatives to extractivism that are health promoting, community building, and, we argue, crime preventative. Drawing on Indigenous philosophies, we examine the notion of stewardship, which stands in contrast to extractivism, involving an emphasis on regeneration and ensuring future life continues as we continue to the move through the Age of Anthropocene. Green criminology and extractivist capitalism The term ‘green criminology’ was first coined in 1990 ( Lynch, 1990 ; Mahabir, 1990 ) and sought
More than a decade on from their conception, this book reflects on the consequences of income management policies in Australia and Zealand.
Drawing on a three-year study, it explores the lived experience of those for whom core welfare benefits and services are dependent on government conceptions of ‘responsible’ behaviour. It analyses whether officially claimed positive intentions and benefits of the schemes are outweighed by negative impacts that deepen the poverty and stigma of marginalised and disadvantaged groups.
This novel study considers the future of this form of welfare conditionality and addresses wider questions of fairness and social justice.
This chapter explores islands as locations that have been shaped, but also created, through processes of human invasion. It considers the role of (neo-)colonial forces in moulding the spaces and places of islands, broadening previous theorizing of island spaces to incorporate islands situated on terra firma and bounded by desert. In respect of the latter, the chapter focuses primarily on the example of remote Indigenous communities scattered across Australia’s sparsely populated ‘outback’ as islands in the desert. These islands have been created and shaped under violent settler colonialism as carceral reserves, thereby producing distinct crime histories and patterns. This enables an exploration of how island spaces can be created and mobilized as part of a broader array of governing techniques for dealing with deviance, which are interlinked with racialized Othering, including bordering of spaces, places, and bodies. ‘Islanding’ is in this case co-opted as a socio-political technique to maintain and perpetuate the white settler state’s legitimacy and claims over stolen Indigenous lands: a sort of ‘islanding as erasure’. The chapter draws comparisons to settler colonies elsewhere and demonstrates the importance of weaving together socio-political and spatial histories to enable a fuller understanding of how islands can inform criminological theorizing.
This chapter explores how the isolation and remoteness of islands might influence and inflect criminological theorizing. As touched on in Chapter 2, islands have tended to be imagined through a Western lens as spaces that are both idealized and feared; their separateness and isolation prompt visions of paradise, but also dislocation and banishment. Island isolation promises a reprieve from the pressures of ‘mainstream’ (‘mainland’) society, but for those who emigrate (or are exiled) to islands, also implies abandonment – the island-dweller either abandoning mainland society, or indeed mainland society abandoning them. This chapter considers the use of islands as sites for managing sick and polluted bodies, including through quarantine stations and lock hospitals, drawing parallels to the way that islands have been used for banishment of the criminal body (for example, islands as prisons). Overall, we argue that criminology has often lacked critical engagement with public health, despite its historical and contemporary significance in regulating bodies, and despite frequent crossover in the use of isolated island spaces to prevent pollution of the body politic by ‘disappearing’ sick, poor, and criminal classes. This chapter seeks to at least partially correct this.
Although much has been written about rural policing, accounts of policing islands are generally rare. Research in the Global North has presented policing in remote and small-scale societies as community focused, owing to low crime rates in such societies. But is there actually less crime or less reportage of crimes, such as domestic violence, which recent research has found to be endemic in all social contexts? This chapter examines the issue of integration in relation to policing in the Pacific, where most research on policing islands has been conducted. The Pacific Islands are loosely sub-divided into cultural and geographic groupings of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. Most Pacific Island communities (PICs) are microstates with small, geographically dispersed populations. Popular culture has provided a largely idealized account of policing in remote and small societies – characterized as homogenous if slightly eccentric communities. However, policing islands demonstrates the need for caution about valorizing specific models of policing as universally appropriate and functional.
Although it is hardly a new insight that social integration as much produces crime as it prevents it, this chapter draws on the case of Pitcairn Island – Britain’s smallest colony and the last British territory in the Pacific – to more deeply explore how intensive social ‘bonding’ capital can be both crime protective as well as criminogenic. The ‘social glue’ of Pitcairn has been a source of both idyllization and horror; it demonstrates a strong sense of island communitarianism, illustrated for instance in the interdependency of the island’s families and the role of local gossip and surveillance in encouraging compliance with local norms. It is, however, these same features that have been attributed to Pitcairn’s secret sex culture that defined Island life and resulted in the Pitcairn Island sexual assault trials (2004), where a third of the Island’s male population were charged with a range of sexual offences, including against minors. This case holds important lessons for criminological theorizing regarding different forms of social capital, emphasizing how extreme insularity, buoyed by island isolation and remoteness, can subvert social norms.
