Race, crime, and criminal justice in Portugal

Abstract

How is ‘difference’ reflected on crime and the criminal justice system in Portugal? The answers obtained depend on which notions we can translate ‘difference’ into: ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘minorities’. This, in turn, depends also on whether we focus on statistics, rates, or, from another angle, experiences of crime and of the criminal justice system. Quantitative and qualitative data highlight different but complementary aspects of a same landscape. This paper focuses on both. It first uses Portuguese official statistics, which allow for grasping ‘difference’ only in terms of the pair: foreigners/citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity. Second, it draws on an ethnographic study in a women’s prison, which allowed for the highlighting of the way categories of race and ethnicity may be at play in crime, law enforcement, and the experience of imprisonment. In all three domains class and the nature of residential areas emerge as important conditions for the relevance of race and ethnicity. The changing intersection between ethnicity and class, mediated by conditions such as the neighbourhood and the workings of the drug economy contributes to prevent, in prison, strong expressions of race and ethnicity as categories of identity and social organization.