Biko Agozino | |
---|---|
Born | Awgu, Enugu State, Nigeria | 27 July 1961
Occupation | Professor of criminology |
Language | English |
Nationality | Nigerian |
Education | PhD in Criminology |
Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Genre | Criminology |
Notable works | Black women and the criminal justice system (1997), Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason (2003) |
Biko Agozino (born 27 July 1961) is a Nigerian criminologist best known for his 1997 book Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. [1]
Agozino was born on 27 July 1961 in Awgu, Enugu State, Nigeria. He attended the University of Calabar where he gained a BSc in Sociology, the University of Cambridge where he gained a Master of Philosophy in Criminology, and the University of Edinburgh where he earned a PhD in Criminology. [1]
Agozino has been editor of the Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations series of books from Ashgate Publishing. His 1997 Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation was the first of these. By 2008 over two dozen books had been published in the series. [2]
He was appointed editor-in-chief of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies and a member of the editorial board of Jenda: A Journal of West African Women's Studies and Culture. [1]
Agozino is a founding member of the international governing council of the Lagos-based think tank the Centre for Democracy and Development . [1] In 2007, Agozino was appointed criminology unit coordinator and professor in sociology at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. [3] [4]
Agozino's work explores the past and present impact of colonisation on the way in which racial and ethnic minorities are treated by justice systems worldwide. [5]
His work develops a postcolonial perspective in African criminology. [6] Agozino challenges the criminology discipline to "decolonize" its theories and methods and to undo the harm that has been done. [7]
In his introduction to Gabbidon's 2007 W.E.B. Du Bois on crime and justice, Agozino notes that "excessive punitiveness" in the criminal justice systems of the US, UK, South Africa and Russia has been increasing rather than reducing the problem of crime. He also noted the hypocrisy of British and American leaders in calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist as he was struggling with the terrorist apartheid regime in South Africa. [8]
His work is theoretical in nature, discussing the development of criminology in western countries and their impact on non-western societies, particularly former colonies. It has rejuvenated the colonial perspective on race and crime. [9]
In his 1997 Black women and the criminal justice system Agozino notes the roles of race and ethnicity in negotiation of power within prison, where coloured people are greatly under-represented among prison officers and over-represented among inmates. [10]
Crime statistics refer to systematic, quantitative results about crime, as opposed to crime news or anecdotes. Notably, crime statistics can be the result of two rather different processes:
Crime films, in the broadest sense, is a film genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film, but also include comedy, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as mystery, suspense or noir.
In the United States, the relationship between race and crime has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century. Crime rates vary significantly between racial groups; a 2005 study by the American Journal of Public Health observed that the odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for blacks compared with whites, with Latino-perpetrated violence 10% lower. However, academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public and early education, and exposure to harmful chemicals and pollution. Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government and private actors. Various explanations within criminology have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria. The organization aims to promote the values of democracy, peace and human rights in Africa, particularly in the West African sub-region.
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.
David S. Wall FRSA FAcSS is Professor of Criminology at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds, England, where he researches and teaches cybercrime, policing, organised and transnational crime and intellectual property crime. He rejoined the University of Leeds in August 2015 from Durham University, where he was Professor of Criminology. Between 2011 and 2014 he was Head of the School of Applied Social Sciences (SASS). Before moving to Durham in 2010 he was Professor of Criminal Justice and Information Society at the University of Leeds, where he also held the position of Head of the School of Law (2005–2007) and Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies (2000–2005). He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.
Race in the United States criminal justice system refers to the unique experiences and disparities in the United States in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Although prior arrests and criminal history is also a factor. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.
Since the 1870s, various pieces of colonial legislation in India during British rule were collectively called the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), which criminalized entire communities by designating them as habitual criminals. Under these acts, ethnic or social communities in India were defined as "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences" such as thefts, and were registered by the government. Adult males of the groups were forced to report weekly to local police, and had restrictions on their movement imposed.
Nicole Hahn Rafter was a feminist criminology professor at Northeastern University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from State University of New York in Albany. She began her career as a high school and college English professor and switched to criminal justice in her mid-thirties.
African Americans, and African American males in particular, have an ethnic stereotype in which they are portrayed as dangerous criminals. This stereotype is associated with the fact that African Americans are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested and convicted for committing crimes. It has appeared frequently in American popular culture, reinforcing the negative consequences of systemic racism.
Shaun L. Gabbidon is a criminologist and the author of many articles and books that typically focus on the areas of racial and ethnic issues in criminology.
Mary Francesca Bosworth is an Australian criminologist who is interested in imprisonment, race, and gender. She is the author of a number of books, including Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (1999), Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (2010), the edited book What is Criminology? (2011), the edited book The Borders of Punishment (2013) and Inside Immigration Detention (2014). Mary Bosworth is UK Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theoretical Criminology.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice was a group of 19 people appointed by President Johnson in 1967 to study the American criminal justice system. Johnson assigned the group the task of fighting crime and repairing the American criminal justice system:
No agency of government has ever in our history undertaken to probe so fully and deeply into the problems of crime in our nation. I do not underestimate the difficulty of the assignment. But the very difficulty which these problems present and the staggering cost of inaction make it imperative that this task be undertaken.
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Nigerians are considered one of the most misunderstood people in Africa, by both other Africans and non-Africans. There are some stereotypes typically associated with Nigerians and these are both positive and negative. Apart from the general stereotypes, there are peculiar stereotypes concerning the ethnic groups in Nigeria that even other Nigerians believe and propagate.
Daniel Earl Georges-Abeyie is an American criminologist and professor in the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas.
Gringo justice is a sociohistorical critical theory developed by Chicano sociologist, lawyer, and activist Alfredo Mirandé in 1987, who used it to provide an alternative explanation for Chicano criminality in the United States and challenge the racist assumption that Chicanos were inherently criminal, or biologically, psychologically, or culturally predisposed to engage in criminal behavior. The theory is applied by Chicano and Latino scholars to explain the double standard of justice in the criminal justice system between Anglo-Americans and Chicanos/Latinos. The theory also challenges stereotypes of Chicanos/Latinos as "bandidos," "gang-bangers," and "illegal alien drug smugglers," which have historically developed and are maintained to justify social control over Chicano/Latino people in the US.
Ngaire May Naffine is an Australian feminist legal academic and Professor Emerita at the University of Adelaide.