Book review: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
| Author | David Henderson |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221116460b |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
severed citizenship ties with her political community and her fellow co-citizens owing to an
incorrigible lack of conscience that acts as an inhibitor to developing and maintaining
co-citizen dispositions”(p. 126: emphasis in original). She believes that this will only
be a small percentage of the convicted population and uses Timothy McVeigh and
Anders Brevik as examples of those who can legitimately be denied the right to vote.
This is not just because what they have done are crimes (which they obviously are), but
“more with the fact that they are the most harmful behaviors against a community”(p.
132).
Tripkovic later develops her argument further with an interesting question: if dis-
enfranchisement is a non-penal sanction, could it be used against those who have
not broken the criminal law? She concedes that: “Ifind no reason not to exclude
such people from the application of the restriction if both the subjective and objective
conditions are satisfied. However, I also trust that this is more of a theoretical than a
practical problem: it seems unimaginable that an act could be so serious as to pro-
foundly damage—economically, politically, militarily, or in another way—a commu-
nity and at the same time not constitute a crime”(p. 132). Unfortunately, even in
modern democracies, there are acts that cause overwhelming social and economic
harm, individual human suffering and community destruction. The perpetrators
remain neither sanctioned, nor their activities criminalised.
As disenfranchisement is a widespread practice in the US and Europe, albeit to
different degrees, Punishment and Citizenship makes an important contribution to
the literature on criminal disenfranchisement. It is both empirically meticulous and
theoretically rigorous. It should be read and the thought-provoking arguments con-
sidered carefully by anyone interested in punishment and citizenship.
Halfway Home: Race, Punishment
and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
Reuben Jonathan Miller
Little Brown, US; 2021, Pp 352
ISBN: 9780316451512
Reviewed by: David Henderson, University
of Glasgow, United Kingdom
The exponential rise of America’s prisoner population, has, over time, altered the
social life of the city. Halfway Home begins by laying out the intersecting racial
and class-based inequalities undergirding this phenomenon: of the 2.3 million
people currently imprisoned in the USA, ‘40 percent are black, 84 percent are
poor, and half have no income at all’(p. 6). Yet, this picture offers only a partial
glimpse of the unsettling social reality mass incarceration has created. Indeed,
Book reviews 395
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