Introduction

One way to consider the entanglements between individual everyday experiences in a Caribbean courtroom today and their relationship to history is to think conceptually about the sociocultural world as three interacting levels. At the bottom is the everyday, anthropological level of life, what each of us experiences personally and individually, and how we adapt culturally to the social realities and environments around us. Then there is the meso level, a more sociological level of groups and institutions such as courthouses, criminal justice systems and the staff who administer them, which impact and intersect with our individual biographies, and social groups and top-down institutions, like the law and police that interact with us as members of groups and social classes. These mesolevel institutions and groups influence our lives in sociological ways and are all shaped and structured by a larger macro-socioeconomic level, which in this chapter I describe as a criminological one. This macro level is the transhistorical assemblage of extractivism of modern racial capitalism and its emergence from the enslavement, forced transportation, murder, torture and genocide that established racialized and patriarchal systems of dominance and control of European colonialism and imperialism, from which the Caribbean and its various ‘post-colonial’ nations emerged.

This chapter explores these transhistorical entanglements and their legacies and examines the entanglements between individual everyday experiences in a Caribbean courtroom today and their relationship to history. The impact of longstanding systems of structural racism, colour and cultural prejudice, and inequalities of status, wealth and gender bias embedded in the local court system on an institutional level and the wider society on a structural level are identified in contemporary patterns of injustice connected to rites and axes of domination court users’ experience on the micro level of their interactions within the local court system of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) today.

The empirical data used for this chapter came from a 24-month mixed-methods study done in collaboration with the Judicial Education Institute of Trinidad and Tobago (JEITT), University College London and the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine campus) on various aspects of the T&T judiciary, including court user experiences of both the Magistrates’ Courts and High Court between 2015 and 2017 (e.g. JEITT 2018; Jamadar and Elahie 2018; Elahie 2017; Kerrigan et al. 2019).