Book review: Anastasia Powell, Gregory Stratton and Robin Cameron, Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618805884 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Mark A Wood |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 571
York’s juvenile justice system. For readers who are less familiar, it is hard to keep track
of the various institutions, categorizations, and how they fit together. This is illustrative
in that it highlights the complexity of the juvenile and criminal justice systems, where
youth might be sent to Rikers Island (a jail with adults), youth detention, or private resi-
dential juvenile facilities, each with their own cultures and consequences. While the
youth learned the norms of their respective institutions, many did not fully understand
their legal status or their rights. For example, a youthful offender designation meant that
one misdemeanor and one felony could be dropped from their record, in recognition of
youths’ lower culpability. Many did not understand this status, and believed that they had
to report all court involvement and arrests. System actors added to this confusion. Still,
as a reader, I wished for a chart or table to clarify both the different categorizations of
youth and the different types of institutions to which they might be sent and why.
Trapped in a Vice is likely to be of interest to a number of audiences. Students and
scholars of juvenile justice, the sociology of punishment, youth, and inequality will
appreciate the deeply human stories of the youth trapped in this system. While Cox is
highly critical of the system, she avoids easy categorizations, presenting all participants
as multidimensional and often well intentioned. In this respect, many workers in criminal
and juvenile justice systems would likely see themselves reflected in this work and
appreciate the analysis. Policy makers would benefit from seeing the historical patterns
of reform attempts, and to listen to Cox’s call for radical nonintervention, an idea pro-
posed over 45 years ago by Edwin Schur.
Anastasia Powell, Gregory Stratton and Robin Cameron, Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in
Digital Society, Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon, 2018; 210 pp.: 9781138636743, £29.59 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Mark A Wood, University of Melbourne, Australia
In recent years, a number of scholars concerned with the impact of digital technologies
on crime and criminal justice have eschewed the label of cybercriminology in favour of
a new term: digital criminology (see, for example, Smith et al., 2017; Tangen, 2018). A
criminological cousin of digital sociology, digital criminology is, as Powell et al. define
it in their excellent new book, Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society,
‘the rapidly developing field of scholarship that applies criminological, social, cultural
and technical theory and methods to the study of crime, deviance and justice in our digi-
tal society’ (p. 12). Bringing critical and cultural criminology into scintillating conversa-
tion with socio-technical theory, Powell et al.’s book seeks to not only invigorate but
extend criminological studies of digital technologies and their enmeshment with crime,
harm and justice. In both respects, the authors succeed. Organized around a series of case
studies, Digital Criminology, as Michelle Brown notes in her back-cover endorsement of
the book, provides an outstanding primer to the field. In this sense, the book reminds me
of Ferrell et al.’s (2008) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Indeed, in Digital
Criminology’s concluding chapter, its authors themselves state that their book represents
‘an invitation—the beginning of a shared scholarly conversation—that seeks to further
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