Book review: Thalia Anthony, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Reviews the book, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment by Thalia Anthony (2013). In this book, Anthony examines how the judiciary in several Australian states recognize indigeneity and how such understandings of ethnic and cultural difference change over time, vacillating from mitigation and sympathy on the one hand to derision and punitiveness on the other. Focusing primarily on sentencing decisions in cases of serious violence and political protest, Anthony unpacks judicial understandings of indigeneity and indigenous communities to make a broader statement about the ways in which postcolonial legal systems engage with indigenous peoples. The book concludes with a discussion highlighting the need for the Anglo-Australian legal system to be restructured so that indigenous communities can regain responsibility for the punishment of transgressors. The book reminds that the power of the postcolonial legal system is never absolute. In short, the book makes an important contribution to postcolonial criminology by situating the criminalization and punishment of indigenous peoples in the colonial process of nation-building, but also in contemporary settler state–indigenous relations. This book advances scholarly discussions of punitiveness through its consideration of postcolonial relations in shifting penal culture and practices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)