1st Edition

Common Law and Colonised Peoples Studies in Trinidad and Western Australia

By Jeannine M. Purdy Copyright 1997
    321 Pages
    by Routledge

    321 Pages
    by Routledge

    Published in 1997. It is well known in Australia that Aboriginal people are currently massively over-represented amongst the prison population. Although it is not officially acknowledged to the same degree in Trinidad, it is also well-known that Afro-Trinidadians are over-represented in the prisons of that county. The disproportionate criminalisation of Aboriginal Australians and Afro-Trinidadians is interpreted by the author as a continuation and concretion of the myth of the barbaric, uncivilised and ungoverned ‘savage; in opposition to which Western legal systems and societies have created their own identities.

    The book departs from much contemporary analysis in this area by drawing strongly upon a historical analysis of the operations of the common law in Trinidad and Western Australia. By doing so, the book illustrates that race/ethnicity and criminalisation are not necessarily contiguous. What such analysis does reveal is another and more constant dimension to criminalisation; and that is economic basis of many of the legal relations instituted under British derived legal systems with respect to colonised peoples.

    1. Introduction  Part 1: Theory, Methodology and All That  2. Theory  3. Methodology  4. Other Matters  Part 2: Contemporary Criminalisation  5. Criminalisation in Contemporary Trinidad  6. Criminalisation in Contemporary Western Australia  Part 3: Law, Violence and Economics  7. Law  8. Violence  9. Economics  10. Conclusion

    Biography

    Jeannine M. Purdy