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Book review: Katja Franko, The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorSarah Tosh
DOI10.1177/1362480620982446
Date01 May 2021
Published date01 May 2021
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-17T8x7cfIddvmy/input 348
Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
Katja Franko, The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power, Routledge: Abingdon, 2019; 250
pp., 7 B/W illustrations: 9781351001441, $160 (hbk), $44.95 (pbk), $44.95 (eBook)
Reviewed by: Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA
The past few decades have witnessed a harshening of borders among migrant-receiving
countries around the world. This shift has been characterized by the increased intertwin-
ing of systems of migration and criminal justice, often undergirded by a stated need to
root out non-citizen “criminals”. Scholars have examined the mechanisms and impacts
of these developments in various contexts—perhaps most extensively in the United
States, the country with the highest rates of incarceration and deportation in the world.
Katja Franko’s The Crimmigrant Other is a fine contribution to this growing body of
literature, with a rich and nuanced account of the everyday workings and rationalizations
that allow for the increasingly punitive treatment of migrants in Europe—at both national
and supra-national levels. Drawing on document analysis, observation, and interviews
conducted from 2011 to 2017, Franko analyzes Norway’s unlikely rise to becoming a top
deporter among European countries, as well as the evolution of Frontex from EU border
control enabler to crime control agency—depicting the rise of “bordered penality” even
in European contexts ostensibly concerned with humanitarianism. She proposes the fig-
ure of the “crimmigrant other” as a constitutive tool that justifies the punitive border
control of rich countries in an increasingly unequal world.
Weaving together legal and political developments, official statements and direc-
tives, and interviews with police and practitioners, Franko’s empirical contribution
provides the basis for astute theoretical analysis that delves to the heart of belonging
and membership—concepts made increasingly tenuous in late-modern society. The
figure of the...

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