Book Review: Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail by Michael L Walker
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231196710 |
| Author | Reuben Jonathan Miller |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
importance of ensuring that school punishment data are made publicly available to under-
stand the scale of the problem. He encourages the use of neutral third-party discipline practi-
tioners, and for the use of restorative justice practices for violence prevention along with
mandatory distribution of make-up assignments. In sum, Bell hopes his book Suspended
can spark inclusive dialogue on school punishment and safety reform, not only for the city
of Detroit but also for each of our respective communities.
As a final evaluation, I applaud Dr Charles Bell for incorporating his own personal journey
as a Black man who grew up in the city of Detroit and encountered many of these same chal-
lenges before obtaining a PhD. His story, incorporated into the research study, helps bring to
light these issues that many people continue to ignore in order to maintain systemic racism in
the United States. In the end, I too learned how schools are anti-Black institutions and what
we can do in our respective communities to improve the wellbeing of children of color and
ensure that education is truly emancipatory.
Reference
Anderson E (1999) The Code of the Streets: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner
City. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Michael L Walker, Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, Oxford University Press: New York, 2022; 288 pp.:
9780190072865, $29.95 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Reuben Jonathan Miller, University of Chicago, USA; American Bar Foundation
I will begin this review with its punchline. Everyone should read Indefinite: Doing Time
in Jail written by the sociologist Michael L Walker. Indefinite is the best book on what
Walker calls penal living, and it is easily one of the best ethnographies I’ve read. Walker
is a sophisticated theorist who takes seriously his research subjects as human beings,
refusing, at every turn, to reduce their experiences to the cages that hold them. He trans-
ports the reader from wherever they are to the inside of the jail cell where bunkmates learn
to clean, and cook, and share moments of despair and levity, and he takes us into the
organs of an institution that classifies, tags, and subjects its residents to the routine vio-
lence of indeterminacy.
The people we meet in the dayrooms, and on the medical wards, and as they await the
resolution of their cases, are full human beings with a full range of emotions and self-
expressions. They are objectified by the staff and through the jail’s institutional
arrangements, sorted into racial groups, marked by their clothing and the classificatory
schemes that operate inside, and governed by a racial politics of confinement that orga-
nizes their lives. We see the processes at work that turn jail residents into “court bodies”
and “criminals,”and walk alongside them as they learn to do time. Time, in fact, is central
to the book’s analysis. Lacking a working clock, or natural light, Walker reveals how the
passage of time is moored to events, like meals or court dates or mail call, and to the kinds
of psycho-physiological states that poor “sleep hygiene,”or news from home, or that the
sights and smells associated with “batched living" produce. Walker shows how the “hard
time”people find themselves doing gets made through jailconditions and by the
254 Theoretical Criminology 28(2)
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