Book Review: Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition by Calvin John Smiley
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806241232289 |
| Author | Khirad Zahra Siddiqui |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
This includes, most importantly, the role of class and other structural factors for crime and
behavior problems, the class-based discriminatory practices by police and social workers,
and the many other ways cognitive biases influence how young people are treated in the
criminal justice field.
The existence of such a lay or folk criminology is interesting, important, and raises key
questions. If theories trickle down from the academic field to the practice field, it suggests
that criminological and sociological research has real societal impact. A follow-up ques-
tion would be how the presence of such a repertoire of (diverse and sometimes contradic-
tory) critical stories might change practices in a field. However, if these criminological
insights were already out there among youths, parents, and professionals, the question
is rather if there is a point in criminology at all. It should at least make criminologists
reflect more on what their role should be. As always, the truth is probably somewhere
in between, but these would certainly be interesting topics to explore more.
So, do all the different qualities and voices in the book come together as one overall
argument? My answer would be both yes and no. At its best, it allows for ambiguity and
openness, enabling readers to make up their own mind; the book combines social criti-
cism, theory syntheses, theory checking and represents an excellent example of the
importance of studying crime storytelling. In parts the different voices join in a harmo-
nious and fruitful polyphony. At other times the different voices and the overall academic
project seem to point in somewhat different directions.
Regardless, in a time where larger theoretical and empirical studies seem to be increas-
ingly outcompeted by shorter formats, Negotiating Class in Youth Justice is highly warranted.
The book is not only a must-read for scholars and students of youth justice but has the poten-
tial to become a contemporary classic and point of reference in traditions as different as
Bourdieusian and class-oriented criminology and studies of lay or folk criminology.
Calvin John Smiley, Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition, University of California Press:
Oakland, California, 2023; pp. 1-223: 9780520385993 (paperback).
Reviewed by: Khirad Zahra Siddiqui, University of California, Irvine, USA
Calvin John Smiley’sPurgatory Citizenship:Reentry, Race, and Abolition is a timely add-
ition to the study of reentry, devoting attention to an underexploredaspect of incarceration
and its links to the movement for prison abolition. Purgatory Citizenship offers a number
of meaningful revelations about reentry,dispelling the common myth that reentry is a for-
malized end goal, and clarifying how it is experienced more as a process. Smiley is thus
able to argue that the reentry process is structured by the same forces that structure other
aspects of the carceral state: racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and a carceral cultureof
punishment that exceeds the spatial boundaries of the prison. He provides important
nuances to position reentry neither as completely similar or dissimilar to incarceration,
but rather as a process that does meaningfully differ from prison, affording some precious
liberties and necessitating new means of adapting to one’s context in the outside world.
Smiley weaves the lived experience of returning citizens involved at a reentry center in
New Jersey into a compelling argument about the ways that the prison reentry system
Book Reviews407
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