Book Review: The next frontier: National development, political change, and the death penalty in Asia, David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. 2009. 554 pp. $35.00 (pbk). ISBN13: 9780195382457
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474509341151 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Author | Margaret K. Lewis |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
community’? This excellent volume represents an important step towards answering
these fundamental questions.
In a volume in which other contributors are generally cautiously optimistic about the
role of sentencing councils, David Indermaur’s chapter is particularly provocative. While
not opposed to the work of sentencing councils, he argues that both penal populism
and liberal reforms conceive of the public as a passive entity to which things must be
done. While penal populism only pretends to deliver people-power, liberal (patrician)
reforms have tended to conceive of the public as ignorant and in need of education.
Neither approach conceives of the public as genuine participants, but rather as ‘a school-
room of subjects waiting to be rescued or educated’ (p. 58). Moreover, he raises an
uncomfortable question: do we really want genuine public participation? Drawing on
the wider disenchantment with the democratic process, Hutton examines the inverse
of this question by arguing that the public may not necessarily want to become actively
engaged.
This volume tackles concretely how sentencing councils have to date attempted to
accommodate ‘the public’ and/or encourage participation. It deals with awkward ques-
tions about the relationships between public opinion, public judgment, the executive,
the judiciary. Given that, as Tonry has pointed out, there have been many more failed
sentencing bodies than successful ones, Penal populism, sentencing councils and sentenc-
ing policy is an essential guide to previous experience around the globe. Yet an import-
ant question remains relatively under-explored in this volume: what counts as ‘success’?
If sentencing councils are a way of countering penal populism, how can we know
whether or not any given council has been successful in these terms? Can we measure
an increase or decrease in penal populism, and if so, how? Or is it simply a question of
knowing penal populism when we see it?
As well as being an indispensable guide for those concerned with both the study and
practice of sentencing...
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