Book Review: Crime and Justice in Scandinavia (Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 40)
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914546586a |
| Author | James Chalmers |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
faith-based agencies, voluntary sector organizations or where church sponsored hetero-
normativity supports family care, the struggle for recognition has been much harder.
The scene is therefore set for a succinct but convincing analysis of the US political
economy of care in Chapter 6. She sums up the position as follows, despite the real gains
made through civil rights activism:
Given the lack of a national-state commitment to care, the reliance on individual market
solutions, the dependency on faith-based agencies to meet additional care needs and, per-
haps more importantly, to reinforce the care regime by defining normative family care obli-
gations, there is little need to call upon lesbian and gay citizens to help fill a care gap ...In
this context, and without federal non-discrimination protections, it is inevitable that lesbian
and gay citizens will continue to be marginalized (p. 131–132).
She concludes that European citizens experiencing social welfare (with values rein-
forcing entitlements to social rights) may think of citizenship in very different ways than
those working in a political rights-based American context and winning a rights-based
argument does not translate into social benefits (p. 134).
This book relies on qualitative data to substantiate its points and I would have liked to
have seen a few more ‘facts and figures’. For instance, I found the information relating to
differential gross domestic product (GDP) expenditure on elderly provision very illumi-
nating. A few more ‘facts’ such as those that showed the match between the richest states
in the United States, the lowest level of religiosity and existence of friendly legislation
would have added to the weight of the arguments. However, this would have required a
longer book. I also needed to be more convinced on the centrality of Christianity, pos-
sibly because my experience of care comes primarily from the United Kingdom. I found
that the book seemed to visualize a wholly white Christian Europe. Its now rich cultural
and growing religious diversity is not reflected at all in the analysis which weakens the
book as a whole. Overall, however, this is a thought provoking book which provides a
valuable new contribution to the literature on the political economy of care.
ANN STEWART
University of Warwick, UK
MICHAEL TONRY AND TAPIO LAPPI-SEPPA
¨LA
¨(eds), Crime and Justice in Scandinavia (Crime and
Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 40). Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
pp. x þ673, ISBN 9780226808826, £52.50 (hbk).
The attention of readers in the Anglosphere has regularly been drawn to – as an Econ-
omist headline in February 2013 puts it – ‘the next supermodel’. There is a consistent
sense that there might be something to be learned from the Nordic countries, even if
we seem perpetually to be on the verge of asking the question rather than actually pro-
gressing to finding out what the answer is. Are these relatively small, successful and
cohesive societies ones which, perhaps through a strong commitment to equality, have
610 Social & Legal Studies 23(4)
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