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Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the global South, with important implications for South/North relations and for global security and justice. Having a theoretical framework capable of appreciating the significance of this global dynamic will contribute to criminology being able to better understand the challenges of the present and the future. We employ southern theory in a reflexive (and not a reductive) way to elucidate the power relations embedded in the hierarchal production of criminological knowledge that privileges theories, assumptions and methods based largely on empirical specificities of the global North. Our purpose is not to dismiss the conceptual and empirical advances in criminology, but to more usefully decolonize and democratize the toolbox of available criminological concepts, theories and methods. As a way of illustrating how southern criminology might usefully contribute to better informed responses to global justice and security, this article examines three distinct projects that could be developed under such a rubric. These include, firstly, certain forms and patterns of crime specific to the global periphery; secondly, the distinctive patterns of gender and crime in the global south shaped by diverse cultural, social, religious and political factors and lastly the distinctive historical and contemporary penalities of the global south and their historical links with colonialism and empire building.

Women's police stations are a distinctive innovation that emerged in postcolonial nations of the global south in the second half of the twentieth century to address violence against women. This article presents the results of a world-first study of the unique way that these stations, called Comisaria de la Mujer, prevent gender-based violence in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. One in five police stations in this Province was established with a mandate of preventing gender violence. Little is currently known about how this distinctive multidisciplinary model of policing (which includes social workers, lawyers, psychologists and police) widens access to justice to prevent gender violence. This article compares the model's virtues and limitations to traditional policing models. We conclude that specialised women's police stations in the postcolonial societies of the global south increase access to justice, empower women to liberate themselves from the subjection of domestic violence and prevent gender violence by challenging patriarchal norms that sustain it. As a by-product, these women's police stations also offer women in the global south a career in law enforcement-one that is based on a gender perspective. The study is framed by southern criminology, which reverses the notion that ideas, policies and theories can only travel from the anglophone world of the global north to the global south.

In the last two decades, there has been an extraordinary growth in incarceration rates in South America, with some variations across national contexts but generally in line with the same trend. Twenty years ago, incarceration rates were relatively low in most countries in the region; despite that knowledge, it has proved difficult to reconstruct the official data for that period. In 1992, with the exclusion of the small countries with less than one million inhabitants in the Northern region of South America such as Guyana, French Guyana and Surinam, only three countries had 100 prisoners or more per 100,000 inhabitants: Uruguay (100), Venezuela (133) and Chile (154). Several other national contexts reflected 'Scandinavian' rates, such as Argentina (62), Peru (69), Ecuador (75) and Brazil (74).

This paper analysed the connection between the emergence and consolidation of a postneoliberal political program and alliance - Kirchnerism - and penal policies in Argentina. Three key moments are identified in this recent period. After the experience of an intense punitive turn during the 1990s and early 2000s, Kirchnerist political alliances tried to deploy a progressive political discourse and agenda on penal issues. Nevertheless, this initially coincided with a strong wave of penal populism 'from below' that continued the precedent trend towards increasing punitiviness. Since 2005, and for a brief moment, this tendency stopped. However, after that and during the presidencies of Fernandez de Kirchner a more volatile and contradictory scenario was generated. The incarceration rate between 2002 and 2014 in Argentina grew substantially as did the rate of convictions. Meanwhile the percentage of suspended sentences as part of the total convictions and the percentage of custodial sanctions both fell. Especially in relation to incarceration, these levels of change are not as stark as those of the preceding decades. However, the trends persist. Therefore, the question of how to transcend the dynamics of the punitive turn remains a pending and urgent political subject. The article argues the importance of analysing why a punitive turn is interrupted and presents an explanation of it.

This paper addresses the process of multiplication and expansion of prisoner governance schemes in Latin American prisons in recent decades, as a forceful phenomenon, but one marked by high levels of variation, within the more general framework of the punitive turn that the region has undergone.A frequent explanation for this process is critically presented, which points to the declinein the state’s capacity to control prison life, in turn linked to the extraordinary growth of the prison population during this period. It is pointed out that this factor surely plays an important role —especially in certain contexts— but that in order to understand this phenomenon it is necessary to go beyond it and take into account the strategies and struggles between the various state and non-state actors in relation to power and order in Latin American prisons, within the framework of specific historical dynamics, building an agonistic perspective that emphasises the centrality of the agency of these actors. To exemplify this alternative view, the case of the multiplication and expansion of evangelical wings in men’s prisons in some Argentine provincial jurisdictions is used. En este trabajo se aborda el proceso de multiplicación y expansión de los esquemas de gobierno de los presos en las prisiones latinoamericanas en las últimas décadas, como un fenómeno contundente, pero signado por altos niveles de variación, en el marco más general del giro punitivo que ha atravesado la región. Se presenta críticamente una explicación frecuente de este proceso, que apunta a la declinación de la capacidad estatal de controlar la vida encarcelada, a su vez vinculada al crecimiento extraordinario de la población encarcelada durante este período. Se señala que este factor seguramente juega un rol relevante —especialmente en ciertos contextos— pero que para la comprensión de este fenómeno se requiere dar cuenta de las estrategias y luchas entre los diversos actores estatales y no estatales en relación con el poder y el orden en las prisiones latinoamericanos, en el marco de dinámicas históricas específicas, edificando una perspectiva agonista que enfatiza la centralidad de la agencia de dichos actores. Para ejemplificar esta mirada alternativa se usa el caso de la multiplicación y expansión de los pabellones evangélicos en las prisiones de varones de algunas jurisdicciones provinciales argentinas.

I am sitting on the subway crossing the Manhattan Bridge on the D train, the express train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. You emerge out of the converted lofts of Dumbo, past the Watchtower building of Jehovah's Witnesses, below you is a small park with a pebbled beach, on one side the iconic view of the Brooklyn Bridge and further on the gigantic commercial towers of downtown Manhattan. On your right side the East River turns lazily past the Williamsburg and the Upper East Side glistens in the sun. It is one of the greatest sights of the world. But nobody on the subway is looking, no one is looking out of the windows: my nearest companion is asleep, people are folded into their newspapers, America Oggi, Novoye Ruskoye Slovo, Sing Tao, Korea Times, El Nacional, as well as The Post and the Daily News. Someone (I guess) is listening to the Grateful Dead on the headphone, somebody else (inevitably) hip hop, polka, country and western, the greatest hits of 1960s. An English-looking gentleman listens to the last week's BBC news from a podcast. A young black man, eyes closed, is swaying to rap on his leaky headphones, mouthing the lyrics. Two kids hunched over their PSPs fighting some battle light years away in another galaxy at the edge of the universe. A Jewish woman mumbles the Torah, the book grasped tightly in her lap. Someone is into a heated conversation on his cell phone ('I told him don't give me that shit'). Two girls gently dance together to Reggaeton on a joined Ipad. Everyone is elsewhere, another place, another time, another sentiment, in dream and in trance, another feeling: everyone is going to work but no one is at work apart from the grey-suited man with red suspenders, anxiously reading the Wall Street Journal. By now we are approaching China Town at a fifth floor level, the perspectives wobble and clash, the Empire State building is in the distance, the Chrysler Building to the far right, immediately Chinese graffiti dance on worn out buildings. But I am the only one looking out of the window, three years in Brooklyn and still a tourist. (Young 2007: 173)

The expression ‘the criminal question’ does not at present have much currency in English-language criminology. The term was carried across from Italian debates about the orientation of criminology, and in particular debates about what came to be called critical criminology. One definition offered early in the debate described it as ‘an area constituted by actions, institutions, policies and discourses whose boundaries shift’. According to this writer, crime, and the cultural and symbolic significance carried by law and criminal justice, is an integral aspect of the criminal question. ’The criminal question’ draws attention to the specific location and constitution of a given field of forces, and the themes, issues, dilemmas and debates that compose it. At the same time it enables connections to be made between these embedded realities and the wider, conceivably global, contours of influence and flows of power with which it connects. This in turn raises many questions. How far do the responses to crime and punishment internationally flow from and owe their contemporary shape to the cultural and economic transformations now widely known as ‘globalisation’? How can something that is in significant ways embedded, situated, and locally produced also travel? What is not in doubt is that it does travel – and travel with serious consequences. The international circulation of discourses and practices has become a pressing issue for scholars who try to understand their operation in their own particular cultural contexts. This collection of essays seeks a constructive comparative view of these tendencies to convergence and divergence.

Women's police stations are a distinctive innovation that emerged in postcolonial nations of the global south in the second half of the twentieth century to address violence against women. This article presents the results of a world-first study of the unique way that these stations, called Comisaria de la Mujer, prevent gender-based violence in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. One in five police stations in this Province was established with a mandate of preventing gender violence. Little is currently known about how this distinctive multidisciplinary model of policing (which includes social workers, lawyers, psychologists and police) widens access to justice to prevent gender violence. This article compares the model's virtues and limitations to traditional policing models. We conclude that specialised women's police stations in the postcolonial societies of the global south increase access to justice, empower women to liberate themselves from the subjection of domestic violence and prevent gender violence by challenging patriarchal norms that sustain it. As a by-product, these women's police stations also offer women in the global south a career in law enforcement-one that is based on a gender perspective. The study is framed by southern criminology, which reverses the notion that ideas, policies and theories can only travel from the anglophone world of the global north to the global south.

Knowledge is a commodity and knowledge production does not occur in a geo-political vacuum. With respect to this, it has to be argued that neo-imperialism involves economic and knowledge flows across continuous space, which is transnational and distinct from the old forms of colonialism which were based on country-to-country occupation. In the context of contemporary geo-politics, these conditions render territorial terrain as less important than discursive terrain (Lo 2011).  So, how is global knowledge in the social sciences (and more specifically in criminology) produced and shared? Where does this production take place? Who are the producers? Whose experiences and whose voices are reflected in dominant academic discourses? How is knowledge disseminated and who gets access to it? These are some of the questions that the project of southern criminology seeks to tackle. To access the full text of the introductory article to this special issue on southern criminology, download the accompanying PDF file.