Book review: Just Sentencing: Principles and Procedures for a Workable System
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895813502275 |
| Author | Neil Hutton |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 633
the harsher realities of policing in the ‘good old days’. Furthermore, there is nothing in
the festschrift on the historical development of police powers and the considerable debate
around contextualization of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which was the
subject of one of Reiner’s major research grants and of several essays.
The second section of Reiner’s collection, entitled ‘Popular culture and crime’, is
really about media cultures, providing an outlet for his encyclopaedic knowledge of
crime and police fictions. Three chapters in the festschrift investigate aspects of how
media cultures represent crime and policing: Frances Heidensohn and Jennifer Brown on
women police in TV cop shows, Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin on ‘mediatized’
chief constables and Martin Innes and Roger Graef on police politics and the media. The
last two begin the crucial process of working out the implications for police of the
Murdoch empire’s phone-tapping practices. Once upon a time, police corruption was
about taking drug dealers’ money or getting convictions by verballing and perjury.
Nowadays, we have apparently to deal with corporatized corruption, as police organiza-
tions get pulled into highly problematic relationships with big business.
Reviewers may be allowed to end with a pedantic niggle. Both Reiner (in his autobio-
graphical introduction, Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy, p. xiv) and
Newburn and Rock (Policing, p. 3) repeat the usual mistake of referring to the sociology
of deviance as being about ‘nuts, sluts and perverts’. The title of Alexander Liazos’ 1972
article was ‘Nuts, sluts and preverts’: it was a joke. Finally, a note on the publishers.
Reiner’s essay collection, which should be in any serious library, is a mixture of repro-
duced original textual images from journals and books and some retyped pieces. As
regards the latter, for a book costing £145, Ashgate could surely afford a proof-reader in
order to avoid typos such as ‘depiciton of detailed police prodedure’ (‘The new blue
films’ p. 206, originally from New Society). Much more positively, the publisher of
Newburn and Peay’s festschrift, Hart Publishing, is now as good as the best university
press. I hope that they will soon produce a paperback edition in order to make it acces-
sible to students. They should find it invaluable, both as an introduction to the doyen of
English policing research and to key issues in contemporary policing and its political
contexts.
References
Liazos A (1972) The poverty of the sociology of deviance: Nuts, sluts, and preverts.
Social Problems 20(1): 103–120.
Manning P (1977) Police Work. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Reiner R (2010 [1985]) The Politics of the Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Richard Frase, Just Sentencing: Principles and Procedures for a Workable System, Oxford
University Press (USA): New York, 2013; 304 pp.: 9780199757862, £35.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Neil Hutton, University of Strathclyde, UK
In this book, Richard Frase, one of the USA’s foremost sentencing scholars, brings his
many years of research and scholarship together to provide a blueprint for jurisdictions
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