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Book review: Justice Reinvestment: Winding Back Imprisonment

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/1748895817707402
Published date01 July 2017
AuthorChris Fox
Date01 July 2017
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-17d0WGCrcwLlQi/input Book reviews
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institutions such as the criminal law) developed hand in hand with the development of
modern capitalism. It is thus important to recognize that criminal laws are enforced against
the poor and the powerless in society, while the wealthy and powerful can commit greater
harms in the name of profit. This sets up a further tension that runs through the book. On
the one hand there is the recognition that the modern institution of criminal law contrib-
utes to ‘a degree of order that is necessary for co-ordination and peaceful coexistence in a
minimally civilized society’ (p. 10) but, on the other, Reiner argues that in practice it helps
to sustain social and economic inequalities in modern capitalist society (p. 190). The indi-
vidualizing of responsibility masks systemic inequalities, while the powerless (those dis-
enfranchised and oppressed by modern capitalism) are punished for their minor forms of
wrongdoing. This critique of practices of oppression, and the use of the criminal law to
facilitate and legitimate these, provides the moral core of the argument as we can see that
the labelling of conduct as crime is an exercise of power of a very specific kind.
This argument, though, raises questions about the limits of the concept of crime ana-
lysed in the book. Reiner’s conditions of possibility link the concept of crime to the
development of the modern state. However, as sovereignty is challenged (even in the
wake of Brexit), with the development of transnational and international crimes, it is
necessary to ask what this might do to our understanding of crime. Reiner’s treatment of
this is disappointing, though. He acknowledges the issue (pp. 93–101), but the discussion
of international crime is limited to a discussion of state crime. This points to the way that
states may become the object of criminal prosecution, but it has less to say about the
ways that new kinds of crime, and new models of enforcement are being created relating
to...

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