Content area
Full Text
Robynne Neugebauer, Ed. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2000. $18.95 CDN; $14.95 US sc.
Criminal Injustice: Racism in the Criminal Justice System is a book that explores the theory of racism and the law by attempting to explain the phenomena of racism in one area of the law, the criminal justice system. It explores the myriad factors that contribute to racism in this context, including the role of media in perpetuating racial sterotypes about Blacks, the policing of First Nations, anti-racist initiatives in probation services, Canada's human rights record, and the meaning of systemic racism, to describe but a few of the themes running throughout the book.
The book is also unusual in its approach in that it engages the reader in a discussion which exposes false beliefs about the non-racist nature of the criminal justice system in Canada and elsewhere. The book not only challanges the reader to re-think firmly held beliefs about the nature of (criminal) justice and equality, but also calls for a practical application of the theoretical knowledge in an effort to eradicate racism in the criminal justice system.
What makes the book particularly dynamic is that it is not written by a single author, nor does it focus on a single country's problem with racism in its criminal justice system. Instead, it is an anthology containing sixteen chapters, contributed by a group of writers dealing with the issue of racism in the criminal justice system in countries as diverse as Britian, the United States, Australia, the South Pacific, and Canada. The book's primary focus, however, is on the existence and eradication of racism in the Canadian criminal justice system....