Book review: Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment
| Author | Barb Toews |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618786846 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 125
A disaster criminology would also need to critically reflect on its own focus. Property
crime, violence and drug offences after Katrina for example, might well demand our
attention, but when a thousand people are killed, largely through official ineptitude and
institutionalized callousness, we need to take care that our emphases do not unwittingly
victim-blame: focusing, with the popular media, disproportionate attention on individual
(and sometimes desperate or justifiable) transgressions within disaster-affected commu-
nities while under-exploring social economic and political processes that cause, fail to
anticipate, fail to mitigate or exacerbate mass human suffering.
A criminology of disaster is overdue as the authors rightly argue and this book is a
welcome step towards it, thoughtfully examining conventional crimes after acute disas-
ter. However, any disaster criminology also needs to expand its vision of what this crimi-
nology might mean and who it might serve. It requires a critical orientation towards
disastrous harms, both acute and chronic, that may go beyond state defined crime. It
needs to question the culpabilities of elites, states and corporations. It needs to ask itself
what justice, as opposed to law, might demand in instances of disastrous harm. An impor-
tant contribution of Frailing and Harper’s work is its clear implication that none of these
questions can be answered without understanding the central significance of the continu-
ity of everyday, normalized inequality and social injustice.
Reference
Dynes R (1994) Community emergency planning: False assumptions and inappropriate analogies.
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 12(2): 141–158.
Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality
in Women’s Imprisonment, University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2017; 260 pp.:
9780520288720, $29.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Barb Toews, University of Washington Tacoma, USA
In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment offers a compre-
hensive and accessible overview of the intersectional pathways approach to female
offending, its implications for how women do their time while incarcerated, and a pro-
posal for a human rights orientation to justice and incarceration. This book successfully
compiles years of research (by the authors and others) into one source, making the book
ideal for the classroom context.
Owen, Wells, and Pollock’s main argument is that women experience incarceration
differently than men because women offend through pathways built by intersectional and
structural inequality. The prison community mirrors this inequality, presenting women
with many of the same threats and limited choices that they faced outside. Women lever-
age various forms of prison capital to protect themselves from these threats and ensure
safety. The authors ultimately propose a human rights orientation to justice which would
reduce the use of incarceration and, when incarceration is necessary, adhere to interna-
tional human rights rules and implement programs focused on addressing women’s path-
ways to prison.
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