Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago by Alison Mountz
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221092214 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
and economic debates of the mid-20th century, informing us as much about the intellec-
tual origins of neo-liberalism as about the social democratic temper that it displaced.
Social Democratic Criminology comes in four substantial chapters. If the first three of
these include a lot of expository work, and chronicle a decline, the fourth strikes a very
different tone. This final chapter argues for a renewal of the social democratic faith for our
times. It is the most personal part of the book, and perhaps the most unguarded and
plainly committed piece of Reiner’s writing that I have read. I would like to think that
its tone is not valedictory, but it is in a proper sense, somewhat prophetic. From what
he all too clearly interprets as the wreckage of a political project, he seeks to draw
some strands of hope. Like generations of socialists before him, from Engels, via Rosa
Luxemburg to Tony Benn, Reiner argues fervently that the choice before us, within crim-
inology and far beyond it, is still one between socialism and barbarism.
No doubt, the effort that Reiner makes to build connections with current scholarship and
social movements is partial and incomplete. Social Democratic Criminology, arguably like
all too much work within the social democratic tradition, has little of substance to say about
gender or sexuality. Although it has only goodwill towards movements for environmental
justice, and for criminological work that contributes to these, it does not add much to
those bodies of work. Above all, it almost completely omits to mention that in our world
new thinking on questions of crime and social justice comes chiefly from scholars and
actors in the global South and East. But to focus unduly on such omissions is also in import-
ant ways to miss the point; and Reiner sincerely longs to pass the torch to new generations.
What we gain from this book is both a much clearer understanding of a major tradition—one
that continues to inform the thinking of many scholars and practitioners around the world,
however implicitly—and a sharp sense of the need to rethink and revitalize that current of
thought. It is a bold and poignant statement by an extraordinary scholar.
References
Marshall TH (1950) Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reiner R (1988) British criminology and the State. The British Journal of Criminology 28(2):
138–158.
Rock P (1994) The social organisation of British criminology. In: Maguire M, Morgan R and
Reiner R (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 125–148.
Taylor I (1999) Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago, University
of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2020; 295 pp.: 9780816697113, $28 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Francesco Vecchio, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
“Too many people are dying in their search for political asylum. As a result …asylum
itself is in crisis”(p. xv). With this poignant statement Alison Mountz opens the
Preface of her book The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement
Book reviews 517
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