Book Review: Policing Undocumented Migrants: Law, Violence and Responsibility
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Author | Anna Lundberg |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918786621 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
These questions aside, Goodman, Page, and Phelps have done a wonderful job refin-
ing current accounts of penal transformations during the late 20th century and making a
theoretical advance in criminal justice scholarship. Meanwhile, it is an encouragement
for those whose reform efforts have lost out during a particular period because it does not
necessarily mean a total failure or their efforts are in vain; rather, they should keep
fighting in the penal field. This book is highly recommended for those who are interested
in not only comprehending criminal justice policies and practices and their social and
temporal logics but also for those involved in promoting reforms in criminal justice.
JIZE JIANG
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China
References
Alexander M (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New
York: The New Press.
Garland D (2018) Theoretical advances and problems in the sociology of punishment. Punishment
& Society 20(1): 8–33.
Kraska PB and Brent JJ (2011) Theorizing Criminal Justice: Eight Essential Orientations. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Schoenfeld H (2010) Mass incarceration and the paradox of prison conditions litigation. Law &
Society Review 44(3): 731–768.
LOUISE BOON-KUO, Policing Undocumented Migrants: Law, Violence and Responsibility. Abingdon,
Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018, pp. 220, ISBN 9781472435019, £115.00 (hbk).
Migrants’ everyday experiences of violent management of migration have been progres-
sively explored in critical migration research (e.g. De Genova, 2002; Khosravi, 2010;
Lind, 2017; Lundberg and So¨derman, 2015; Sager, 2016). A field that remains under-
researched is the crossroads of different legal areas and practices. This makes Policing
Undocumented Migrants: Law, Violence and Responsibility a welcome contributio n,
both theoretically and empirically. This book is of general interest for research trying
to understand what migration law tells police and immigration officers to do in the name
of ‘justice’, and its unintended and often unseen consequences. Furthermore, the
research demonstrates the intersection between social change and migration manage-
ment in terms of how certain migration legal practices become authoritative and how
accountability matters in this setting. In time, the study reaches over the last two decades
of the Australian development and explores how legal conventions, doctrines, proce-
dures and institutions produce ‘illegality’, a term borrowed from Dauvergne (2008).
Four case studies examine the complex practices of illegalization, which have become
routine in the everyday activities of diverse institutions and legislative frameworks as
well as in their intersection. Although the context is Australian, there are many lessons to
be learned from a Northern European standpoint.
Book Reviews 661
To continue reading
Request your trial