Book review: Sentencing in the age of information: From Faust to MacIntosh, Katja Franko Aas. London: Glasshouse Press, 2005. $48.95 (pbk). ISBN 1—904385—38—9
| Author | Richard Perry |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745070090040403 |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
is not reducible to changes in gender, class or race since all of these variables are bound
up with the onset of ‘late modernity’. Garland, in grouping together the UK and the
USA, analysed one set of responses and thinks that there is a ‘limited variety of adaptive
patterns’ (p. 180), and speculates that a nation’s welfare regime will be a good pre-
dictor of crime control (for confirmation see Kilcommins et al., 2004). This should lead
us, if we are looking for normative guidance, away from simply finger-pointing at
politicians towards a more thoughtful analysis of how social structures order our lives
and how these different regimes produce a collateral damage of public life of which we
remain only dimly aware.
Lakatos (1995) argued that every theory is born refuted and dies refuted. What
matters is not whether critics can conjure up instances that allegedly falsify the frame-
work of CoC but whether the research programme advanced therein serves to stimulate
new discoveries and lines of inquiry. In this respect, CoC has worked admirably and
this collection of essays shows how Garland’s insights can lead to an enriched under-
standing of contemporary penal change.
References
Garland, David (2001) The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary
society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kilcommins, S., I. O’Donnell, E. O’Sullivan and B. Vaughan (2004) Crime, punish-
ment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.
Lakatos, Imre (1995) The methodology of scientific research programmes: Philosophical
papers, volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barry Vaughan
Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, Ireland
Sentencing in the age of information: From Faust to MacIntosh, Katja Franko Aas. London:
Glasshouse Press, 2005. $48.95 (pbk). ISBN 1–904385–38–9.
It is no easy task to do justice to the many virtues of this book in the space of a review.
The volume is modest in its dimensions, with only 158 pages of text (a total of 205
pages including illustrative appendices, bibliography and index), yet it is written with
a spare elegance that emphasizes the originality of its analysis.
The central import of this book is captured by Nils Christie in the very first sentence
of his preface to the volume: ‘This is a deep book about how we are prevented from
going deep.’ The book’s author, Katja Franko Aas, asks her readers to attend to recent
developments that have been taking shape upon the polished institutional surfaces of
criminal sentencing practices in recent years (her examples are drawn largely from the
United States, but Aas points out that the historical trends she describes are widespread
in western court systems). As she argues:
new forms of decision-making introduce and privilege a certain mode of thinking which is
based on working on the surface, rather than on in-depth understanding. Symbolised by the
MacIntosh computer with its easy-to-interpret icons, this new mode of thought represents a
culture where work becomes ‘transparent’ and one can get things done without needing to
understand them. (p. 5)
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