Book review: Penal Abolitionism
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Author | Tom Daems |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612441097 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Theoretic Criminology 16(4)
Certainly, the reader of this text will find themselves profoundly re-examining their
‘spectatorship’ of on-screen violence.
References
Augé M (1999) The War of Dreams: Studies in Ethno Fiction. Trans. Heron L. London: Pluto
Press.
Baudrillard J (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Glaser SF. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan
University Press.
Lowenstein A (2005) Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the
Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vincenzo Ruggiero, Penal Abolitionism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; 234 pp.: ISBN:
9780199578443
Reviewed by: Tom Daems, Ghent University, Belgium
It might seem odd to write books on penal abolitionism these days (and maybe even
more odd to devote reviews to such books): isn’t abolitionism for criminology what
moonboots are for fashion, that is, one of the fads of the 1970s? Indeed, for some it might
be tempting to think of abolitionism (or moonboots) in terms of a closed chapter, some-
thing that belongs to a bygone era when birds could talk and bats could sing. However, a
considerable number of people would probably disagree. In recent years there has been
a remarkable revival of interest in the old ideas of the abolitionist school. In 2008 the
German journal Kriminologisches Journal devoted special attention to the question ‘Can
prison still be saved?’ (Ist das Gefängnis noch zu retten?). The thematic issue included
an exchange of views among some of the founding and second-generation figures of the
post-war abolitionist movement who reflect back upon the achievements and failures of
abolitionism and speculate about its future (Feest and Paul, 2008). A year later the Dutch
Society of Criminology awarded its inaugural Willem Adriaan Bonger Lifetime
Achievement Award posthumously to Louk Hulsman. More generally, as Ian Loader
(2010: 350) suggested in a special issue of Theoretical Criminology devoted to ‘reinvent-
ing penal parsimony’, moderation seems to be in vogue. And if moderation indeed seems
to be in vogue, then revisiting the ideas of the abolitionist school is not that exotic an
enterprise as it may seem at first sight.
This seems to be a good moment, then, to publish a book on abolitionism. Towards the
end of Penal Abolitionism Vincenzo Ruggiero explains the motives that led him to write
the book: his first aim is ‘to avoid abolitionism being “silently silenced” or “abolished”’
from the spectrum of concepts offered to criminology students’ (p. 200); and, second, he
attempts ‘to link abolitionist “radicalism and utopianism” with views of crime and the law
embedded in the Western cultural tradition and its concrete, reasonable, options aimed at
the reduction of pain’ (p. 201). Without...
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