The scale of criminalization of Afro-Caribbean people in Britain cannot be exaggerated. A Home Office report in 1989 shows that between 1984 and 1985 there were 521 prosecutions for indictable offenses per 1,000 of the young (aged 17-20) Afro- Caribbean male population in the Metropolitan Police District, i.e, over half of the age cohort. The generation of racial divisions in society is most easily understood through the use of the concept of "racialization," which emphasizes both the reality of the group formation process and the social construction of the differences between the racial groups so formed. The process of racialization is also of particular significance because it is one of the primary means through which subordination is produced and reproduced in an unjust society. This essay develops the thesis that the British criminal justice system is a racializing institution by advancing four connected propositions. The first proposition is that the history of relations between British black people and the police must be set against a theoretical analysis of criminalization. The second is to suggest that this process of criminalization must in turn be placed in the context of the racializing discourses that circumscribe British black communities. The third is to suggest that the process of criminalization itself now constitutes a significant racializing discourse. Finally, the author proposes that it is possible for so many contradictory constructions of race to coexist because of the deployment of social relations as products in time and space. 32 references