Book Review: Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice
| Author | Jize Jiang |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663918786606 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
PHILIP GOODMAN, JOSHUA PAGE, AND MICHELLE PHELPS (eds),
Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press,
2017, pp. 240, ISBN 9780199976065, £19.99 (pbk).
Theorizing penal order and theoretical advancement on punishment has long been a
concern for criminological scholarship. Not long ago, in the piece ‘Cri minal Justice
Theory: It’s Time to Ask Why’, Kraska and Brent (2011) lament the theoretical deficits
of criminal justice compared with the study of crime causation and outline eight theore-
tical approaches to aid understanding of criminal justice. The sociology of punishment
has made remarkable advances over the past two decades and produced an interdisci-
plinary and sizable volume of literature on the nature of punishment and penal change as
well as their social forms, functions, and foundations (Garland, 2018). Now the theore-
tical enterprise of studying punishment and criminal justice is continuing to evolve with
the release of a book by Goodman, Page, and Phelps, Breaking the Pendulum: The Long
Struggle over Criminal Justice, which aims to propose a different, but meticulously
refined, approach to making sense of criminal justice and penal order.
As the book title boldly suggests, the authors seek to revise the widely embraced
pendulum model of criminal justice that has been represented in prestigious legal scholar
William J. Stuntz’s posthumously published book, The Collapse of American Criminal
Justice. They argue that the pendulum metaphor for criminal justice has limitations in
capturing and grasping criminal justice, thereby distorting the nature and process of
penal change. It is quite problematic because the pendular logic assumes that one crim-
inal justice regime is replaced wholesale with another (rupture); presents the criminal
justice model as moving back and forth without contingency, variation, and struggle
(mechanical); and tends to treat American criminal justice as a monolithic, unified
‘system’ (homogeneity) (p. 7). In doing so, the ‘pendulum swing’ (or as I interpret as
the ‘either-or’ way of thinking) may obscure the real complexity and nuance of criminal
justice operations and thus inaccurately reveals the nature of penal order over history.
As such, Goodman, Page, and Phelps propose an alternative approach to interpreting
penal dynamics in the United States, one they term as ‘an agonistic perspective’. The-
oretically, neither do they attempt to develop grand narratives on penal changes nor do
they focus on penal policies and practices of specific locales. Rather, they provide mid-
level accounts of ‘how and why penal practices change in given times and places through
the lens of contestation’ (p. 15). Building on the logic of Bourdieu’s field theory, this
perspective posits that the inherent engine of penal change lies in the contestation and
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(5) 658–667
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918786606
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