Book review: Angélica Durán-Martínez, The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619835631 |
| Author | Kristin Bergtora Sandvik |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Theoretical Criminology 23(3)
court-ordered monetary sanctions; Beckett and Herbert, 2009 on “banishment” laws).
Misdemeanorland offers an important addition to this scholarship, as Kohler-Hausmann
uncovers legal tools that enhance the social control power of courts to monitor the poor
without locking them up. But by overlooking this related research, she downplays the
breadth of this larger trend and misses opportunities to expose dynamics underlying it.
This could have highlighted ways in which mass misdemeanors is a distinctive problem
from mass incarceration.
While these literatures are not fully incorporated into Kohler-Hausmann’s analysis,
their absence does not diminish the fact that Misdemeanorland is a valuable contribution
to research on the criminal justice system. It will be useful to scholars interested in crimi-
nal court operations, law and inequality, social control, and criminal justice administra-
tion. Misdemeanorland would be an excellent resource for graduate courses and classes
of undergraduates capable of following occasional forays into the details of organiza-
tional sociology and criminal procedure. Anyone studying how criminal courts adminis-
ter justice and control marginalized populations should engage with Kohler-Hausmann’s
research and would be well served to treat it as a model.
References
Beckett K and Herbert S (2009) Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Harris A (2016) A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor. New York:
Russell Sage.
Van Cleve NG (2016) Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wacquant L (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Angélica Durán-Martínez, The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops and Politicians in Colombia
and Mexico, Oxford University Press: New York, 2018; 328 pp.:...
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