In Chapter One, we revealed our motivations for writing this book. Paramount was a desire to contribute to the development of an Indigenous criminology, and to demonstrate the ‘added value’ that a critical Indigenous-informed perspective can bring to analysis of significant criminological issues. Over recent decades, one of the key issues that criminologists have been exploring is the significant expansion in global markets for crime control policies and interventions (Newburn and Sparks, 2004; Tauri, 2014). While criminological attention to this phenomenon has grown, little attention has been given to its impact ‘on the ground’, at the micro-level, and even less so to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. For these reasons, and to enable us to fulfil the motivations discussed previously, this chapter focuses on the Indigenous experience of the contemporary globalisation of crime control. Utilising the increasing globalisation of the Family Group Conferencing (FGC) forum that was ‘invented’ in New Zealand in the late 1980s, we explore the impact that the increasing cross-jurisdictional transfer of crime control products is having on Indigenous peoples residing in settler colonial contexts.

The globalisation of crime control

During the period 1980 to 2000, ‘globalisation’ became the focus of significant research and commentary across the social sciences (Hopkins, 2002; Scholte, 2005), including the discipline of criminology (Findlay, 1999; Sparks and Newburn, 2002). The impact and sociocultural value of the increased globalisation of economic and cultural artefacts has been looked upon with both admiration and suspicion, depending on the ideological and political positions held by commentators (Robertson, 1990). For some, the significant growth in flows of capital, people and information has opened up new opportunities for social, economic and political advancement, and experiences never before known in human history (Watson, 2004). For others, globalisation represents the unfolding of tyrannical rule of peoples by a totalitarian global economic regime; one that works for the benefit of capital and those that control it (Held and McGrew, 2000). Whatever one's position on globalisation – enthusiastic or sceptical – the reality of what may be described as the increasing globalisation of contemporary life-worlds is undeniable (Lemert et al, 2010, pp 203-4). As we will demonstrate in this chapter, this is especially the case in relation to Indigenous peoples’ experiences of the practice of crime control in the settler colonial context.