Albert W. Dzur, Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury
| Author | Malcolm M. Feeley |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513520473 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
presented in long passages of reporting, with the author summarizing events and
interactions, instead of presenting them more in the form of field notes with some
examples of dialogue, which might have enhanced the reporting and made it come
alive. Perhaps the liveliness also suffers as the ethnography is not presented by
writing with a present tense. I also missed some more detailed analysis and an
exploration of negative cases, of deviations from the common picture. As it is,
the text is repetitive at times.
There is no doubt that the book was written from a normative perspective; small
wonder, given the author’s field experiences – and an indignation that must have
reached fever pitch when his own son, calmly waiting for the bus, was the victim in
one of those disproportionate deployments of resources: four vehicles, 15 officers,
and the use of methods otherwise devoted to riot control. The critique, not only of
the police but of a society which breeds such unequal treatment, colors the book,
and you may well find the author’s questions pertinent: how is it that in a rich
country with democratic principles, segregation and discrimination are allowed to
flourish to the extent that some categories of citizens become virtually unprotected
by the law? And why have the police come to play the role of maintaining a social
order based on ethnic distinctions, rather than on keeping general public order?
These issues are compelling and important (in more countries than France), but
raising them in the form of a social critique, as here, is not without its problems. For
one thing, the reader may well wonder how much the author’s analyses are influ-
enced by his moral indignation. To be sure, Fassin knows his social science police
studies, and he has done his field work thoroughly – yet you still miss the ‘socio-
logical eye’ which would increase your understanding, excite and surprise you.
Malin A
˚kerstro
¨m
Lund University, Sweden
Albert W. Dzur, Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury, Oxford University Press:
New York, 2012; 240 pp. (including index): 9780199874095, $49.50 (cloth)
This is a challenging book to review. It is at once a meditation on the failures of US
civic virtue and public institutions, and a blue print for enhancing the role of the
jury as one means for ameliorating this failure. The two parts lead in somewhat
different directions, although they are tied together by a concern with the potential
role of the jury in criminal trials.
Dzur’s reflections on the state of US criminal justice raise profound issues, and
lead to a counter-intuitive proposal. He engages seriously with the liberal claim
that penal populism and too much public participation (curiously Dzur neglects the
issue of race) is one of the central causes for the extraordinary harshness of the
criminal justice system in the United States, in sharp contrast to more moderate
policies in the professionalized systems of Western Europe. He rejects their claims,
arguing that the failings of the US system are due in large part to too little, not too
602 Punishment & Society 16(5)
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