Authoritarian Criminology and Racist Statecraft: Rationalizations for Racial Profiling, Carding and Legibilizing the Herd

Abstract

This essay is a discrete survey of administrative-authoritarian criminologists’ neutralizing techniques for justifying and aiding and abetting racial profiling in policing and, by inference, racialized ‘carding’. Principally focused on Canada and the US, material for this survey arises from the effort of administrative-authoritarian criminologists who claim to refute commissioned reports, case law and obiter dicta, government reports and scholarly research affirming racial profiling in particular and racial discrimination in the criminal legal system generally.

Rooted in counter-colonial, anti-criminology and abolitionist epistemology my method of exposition is to turn the claims administrative-authoritarian criminologists hold to be true back onto criminology itself to see what account it provides for itself. Following the path worn by Hannah Arendt, I set out to demonstrate that in taking the effects of racial profiling and the legibilizing of ‘carding’ as objectively authoritarian-criminologists, administrative-authoritarian are irresponsible in the exercise of judgment to true ideas.