Commentary

Meg Foster starts her introduction to this special issue with an important truism: criminal justice is a social construct containing myriad messy pasts that profoundly shape the present.It is a repository of social values, many of which are long past their usedby date.It defends an order of things that is classist, gendered and often deeply racist; built around a legal subject who was (is) male, heterosexual, European and middleclass.Indeed, as all of the authors in this cluster point out, criminal justice in much of the former British Empire remains insidiously, if inconsistently, colonial. 1As Clare Anderson, Hamish Maxwell-Stuart and others have shown, it carries within it routines of management built to maintain and secure the mass transfer of forced labour from the metropole to and among colonial peripheries. 2 As Amanda Nettelbeck et al. have shown, in settler polities criminal law (hand-in-hand with coercive regimes of protection) served and serve the ends of dispossession. 3 Perhaps most importantly, postcolonial criminal justice has been profoundly shaped by imperial insecurity: its bounds distended by the permanent crisis of imperial occupation; its practice riddled with the exceptions and discretions that facilitated extractive and/or settler colonialism.As a result, criminal justice and policing mediate the interactions of swathes of citizens and non-citizens with states in the remnants of the British Empire through a series of variable but related routines -variable because discretion fundamentally shapes encounters between postcolonial subjects and police, and familiar because many people come premarked by the law as deviant, disorderly or 'other'.This is rather a lot of baggage, and, as this collection suggests, the imperial detritus in postcolonial criminal law poses difficulties for historians and criminologists alike.How does one account for it ethically?How might one fix it?Read together, the core contribution of these three articles is to invite us to think about the colonial work