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Book Review: Sentencing and Punishment. The Quest for Justice

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorDaniel Monk
Published date01 August 2006
Date01 August 2006
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/147322540600600207
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-18a142HI554azC/input j:yj065565 19-6-2006 p:74 c:0
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Youth Justice 6(2)
this comparative theme by presenting evidence from field research that was completed
by Burney in Holland and Sweden. Finally, Chapter Eight presents her conclusions,
which echo W. J. Wilson’s penetrating research about impoverished American black
ghettoes that concluded that you cannot blame poor communities for social
malfunction, when there are few opportunities for improvement and a dearth of
institutional support for those communities. Or as Burney puts it ‘if civil society has
vanished, how can poor people, excluded from mainstream society physically and
economically, be expected to manage order on their own? Such communities suffer
from uncontrolled crime and disorder through the very fact of their isolation and lack
of support’ (p.170).
This wonderfully argued book is an antidote to all the common sense, bar-room,
Daily Mail philosophers, who see the reality of problem behaviour of various kinds as
rooted in the decline of civility in late modernity, and the personal responsibility of
those who are causing genuine distress, and who should thus be controlled through
ever more draconian legislation. Indeed, Burney suggests that legal measures which
were proposed as suitable for dealing with suspected terrorists and which rightly caused
public outcry before these proposals were withdrawn, are now almost routinely applied
with no such qualms to some of our most marginalized young people. More than this,
what Burney demonstrates is that what matters above all else are structural factors –
opportunities for jobs and employment, good schools, and a welfare safety net that
provides a bulwark against the extremes of poverty – and if we get these right, as she
suggests that the Swedes still do, then these will deliver the circumstances in which
people can go about their lives peaceably and which will also make others behave.
S. Easton, and C. Piper, Sentencing and Punishment. The Quest for Justice,
Oxford University...

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