Book Review: Justice in the risk society
| Date | 01 October 2005 |
| Published date | 01 October 2005 |
| Author | Pat Carlen |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700415 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
policies that currently doom prisoners to failure in the community, while offering a
compelling agenda for revitalizing parole (both as a form of discretionary early release and
an experimental practice of reintegration) as means for solving the USA’s reentry problem.
Perhaps the only problematic theme in the book is one that accurately highlights the
greatest challenge to the reentry movement. Petersilia’s chapter on ‘the victim’s role in
prisoner reentry’ aptly recognizes that crime victims, and their powerful political allies,
represent a potentially devastating source of resistance to reinvigorating parole. For those
committed to the logic of symbolic recognition, vengeance and zero tolerance, parole
in any form is not punishment or control enough. With admirable (but to this reviewer
unjustifiable) optimism, Petersilia argues for giving victims a larger role in parole
decision making. It is hard to see, however, how this can ever lead to an expansion in
parole, which will be opposed at every turn by victim organizations. Rather, the true
genius of reentry (and one that can be expected to unleash fierce resistance) is to place
victims in competition with the only interest group that can perhaps outweigh them in
contemporary politics, i.e. the vast majority who fear becoming victims.
References
Bottomley, Keith A. (1990) ‘Parole in transition: A comparative study of origins,
developments, and prospects for the 1990s’, in Michael Tonry and Norval Morris
(eds) Crime and justice: A review of research, pp. 319–74. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Cavender, Gray (1982) Parole: A critical analysis. Port Washington, NY: Kinnikat Press.
Lynch, Mona (1998) ‘Waste managers? The new penology, crime fighting, and parole
agent identity’, Law and Society Review 32: 839–70.
Messinger, Sheldon, John Berechochea, David Rauma and Richard Berk (1985) ‘The
foundations of parole in California’, Law and Society Review 19: 69–106.
Petersilia, Joan (1999a) ‘Parole and prisoner reentry in the United States’, in Michael
Tonry and Joan Petersilia (eds) Prisons, pp. 479–530. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Petersilia, Joan (1999b) ‘A decade of experimenting with intermediate sanctions: What
have we learned?’, Justice Research and Policy 11: 9–24.
Rothman, David J. (1980) Conscience and convenience: The asylum and its alternatives
in progressive America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Simon, Jonathan (1993) Poor discipline: Parole and the social control of the underclass,
1890–1990. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Travis, Jeremy (2000) But they all come back: Rethinking prisoner reentry. Washington,
DC: National Institute of Justice.
Jonathan Simon
UC Berkeley, USA
Justice in the risk society, Barbara Hudson. London: Sage Publications, 2003. 258 pp.
Justice in the risk society is the latest in a distinguished series of treatises by Barbara
Hudson on the nature of justice in modern/postmodern societies. It is by far the most
ambitious of her books to date and yet, like its predecessors, manages successfully to
BOOK REVIEWS
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