ABSTRACT
While critical attention is often directed, and rightly so, to the various stages of criminal justice – from policing to prisons – rather less is paid to the moments that launch criminalizing rituals. How, for example, do local subjects come to recognize particular events as ‘criminal’? Which contextual procedures are deemed legally appropriate for receiving and processing information that a crime has taken place? In what ways does law establish the identities of accuser, accused and authorized agent at entrances to criminal justice? And how do legal processes regulate truth-telling practices at entrances to criminal justice? Such questions take seriously critical approaches that showed crime to be a historical creation of underlying socio-political, cultural and economic structures (e.g., Foucault, 2014; Christie, 1994; Taylor, Walton, & Young, 1973; Reiman, 1990). Crime emerges in societies, that is, from the partisan decisions of legislators, deponents, police and prosecutors, justices of the peace, juries and judges. However, at the start of criminalization processes, one finds momentary suspensions of everyday life. Though often overlooked, these suspensions enable criminalizing law’s sanctioned authorities to step in as gatekeepers in order to judge whether specific acts and persons should be considered as ‘criminal’. Focusing specifically on such inaugural instants of decision at entryways to criminalization, the following discussion examines two late nineteenth-century Western Canadian cases – one in 1888 at Edmonton (North West Territories, now Alberta) and the other in 1890 at Nanaimo, British Columbia. Surviving archival records in both instances narrate how colonial law opened preliminary legal gates, exposing two accused subjects to the prospect of criminalization.
