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Book Review: J. Harvey Young Men in Prison: Surviving and Adapting to Life Inside Cullompton: Willan Press, 2007. £30.60 (hbk) ISBN 1—84392—203—7

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 February 2009
AuthorAzrini Wahidin
DOI10.1177/17488958090090010604
Date01 February 2009
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17Ei0qHfnPRITk/input Book Reviews
115
our rights are based upon our fulfilment of certain prior obligations towards
others. For the Third Way and communitarianism these obligations explicitly
include legal duties towards others’ security—which is to say to a duty of con-
cern for their vulnerability. This is the core of contemporary ‘moralizing’, and
these theories claim to draw on several moral traditions—Christianity, classi-
cal republicanism and social-democracy, for example.
Of course, these theories’ claims are not necessarily any good. An argu-
ment might be made that the concept of moral obligation which underlies
ASB policy is an empty one, by virtue of its lack of any specific substantive
content other than whatever makes other people feel secure—it is merely
‘therapeutic’. And this may be inadequate as a basis of moral order, with the
result that the political elite has been reduced to a permanent state of panic,
as Waiton argues it has been (p. 141). But this is far from self-evidently true.
There is no evident crisis of legitimacy and of social order, notwithstanding
widespread political demoralization and the pervasive sense of anxiety that
is, as Waiton rightly argues, officially promoted. Waiton here assumes pre-
cisely what he needs to demonstrate if he is to sustain his thesis of ‘amoral
panic’—that contemporary political beliefs are morally vacuous and cannot
provide a workable basis for social order.
Since it omits any consideration of the moral resources of the ‘politics of
vulnerability’, Waiton’s forthright challenge to the authority of the ASB
powers in the later parts of the book is often assertive and hard to follow.
This problem is not helped by the sometimes idiosyncratic writing style and
by a poorly integrated chapter on his wider theoretical perspective of
‘diminished subjectivity’. Nevertheless, this is a book packed with sharp
and original insights that marks out a significant new line of enquiry for
theories of criminal law and criminal justice.
J. Harvey
Young...

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