Book review: Generations through Prison: Experiences of Intergenerational Incarceration
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895820972494 |
| Author | Jasmina Arnez |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 727
Mark Halsey and Melissa de Vel-Palumbo, Generations through Prison: Experiences of
Intergenerational Incarceration, Routledge: Abingdon and New York, 2020; 168 pp.: 978-
0815375166, £120.00 (hbk), 978-1351240574, £36.99 (ebk)
Reviewed by: Jasmina Arnez, University of Oxford, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1748895820972494
In criminology, parents’ criminal history has often been identified as a strong predic-
tor of youth delinquency alongside family breakdown and poor parenting (e.g.
Farrington, 2003). However, the precise ways in which parental offending and impris-
onment interplay with genetic and environmental risk factors to result in the transmis-
sion of behaviour, including crime, across generations remain poorly understood. In
addition, why some families experience intergenerational incarceration while others
with similar characteristics do not – as well as with what consequences – is still
empirically underresearched.
Generations through Prison is an important book that addresses these insufficiencies
and challenges common-sense understandings of the relationship between crime, impris-
onment and the family. Drawing on prison survey data and the narratives of second- and
third- (and sometimes fourth- and fifth-) generation prisoners in South Australia, the
book sets out an ambitious goal of understanding the complexity of mechanisms that
affect the formation and continuation of familial trauma, crime and incarceration. In
addition, it aims to disentangle how imprisonment shapes particular families’ experi-
ences of the criminal justice system to suggest viable changes in how prison is done in
the 21st century.
The first chapter (‘Intergenerational Incarceration in Context’) establishes intergen-
erational incarceration as a significant social concern across jurisdictions and distin-
guishes it from intergenerational offending. Chapter 2 (‘Getting and Analysing the Data’)
presents how the authors gathered and analysed the surveys and interview transcripts on
which the book is based. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates and comments on the
research participants’ demographic data. By doing so, it does not only affirm deprived
and poorly educated men, often of Indigenous background, as the ‘usual suspects’ of the
Australian criminal justice system, but also emphasises the personal weight of familial
incarceration that they carry.
The book’s main empirical contribution is presented in the next two chapters. Chapter
3 (‘The Ubiquity of Trauma and Loss’) uses the density of research participants’ accounts
to present the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, loss and abuse in some
families. The chapter exposes prisons – along with care homes, juvenile institutions,
social services and the police – as aggravating the ‘cascading effects of [. . .] instability’
(p. 33) within particular families and thereby contributing to the cycle of incarceration
instead of preventing it. Importantly, the chapter also critically addresses the prevalence
of trauma in the lives of Aboriginal prisoners.
Chapter 4 (‘Three Generations through Prison’) reveals the adverse lived experiences
of intergenerational incarceration by presenting together the narratives of three genera-
tions of prisoners. Building on the findings in Chapter 3, the chapter argues that incar-
ceration nowadays still encourages values and behaviours that are corrosive to the
To continue reading
Request your trial