Book Review: Violence and Crime in Cross National Perspective
| Author | Satyanshu K Mukherjee |
| Date | 01 June 1986 |
| Published date | 01 June 1986 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486908601900207 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
BOOK REVIEWS 123
The last story in the quartet, that of Josie O'Dwyer, is the tale of degradation,
violence and courage integral to survival in a women's prison. Employing "private
pain to inform apublic issue" (p 181), Josie describes the systems of abuse and
exploitation existing within women's prisons. She documents the fear and
intimidation of Borstal: the "smashing up"; "winding up" of prisoners culminating
in self-injury; the "setting up" of prisoners resulting in injury to
other
prisoners; the
radical intrusiveness of the regime; the misuse of private information; the denial of
identity; and the recourse to psychiatric intervention. Josie catalogues the penalties
for failing to survive: death, institutionalization, self-injury, madness. Josie, a
survivor, has learnt to manipulate the limits of the system; she was the "Momma"
of
her
wing. She talks of the sharing of the pain amongst incarcerated women.
However, Josie also discusses the emotional deprivation:
"You
learned to block it
all off and then it became aknot inside you, a wound that gets worse, awound that
doesn't heal" (pp 178-9).
Criminal Women, is providing aforum for the first-hand description of criminal
careers, is a stimulating departure from the practice of using statistical data to
generate conclusions regarding female criminality.
Here,
the subjects define their
own experience with minimal intervention from others; Carlen appears to guide the
direction of the material with both subtlety and skill. Following in the tradition of
Carlen's earlier work, (Women's Imprisonment), the present
book
further explores
the meaning of the slogan "Discipline, Infantilize, Feminize, Medicalize and
Domesticize".
This book is recommended reading for those professionals concerned with
women's imprisonment, for academics teaching women's study courses,and for
criminologists. If Criminal Women provokes an evaluation of the current mythology
surrounding the conception of women as criminal and prisoner, then the book will
have served its intended purpose.
Canberra
SUZANNE
HA
TIY
Violence and Crime in Cross National Perspective,
Dane
Archer and Rosemary
Gartner, Yale University Press (1984)341 pp, US$30.
Archer and
Gartner
have amassed aformidable amount of data on crime from
110 nations and 44 international cities.
That
fact in itself is an accomplishment of
significant proportion. The authors, in preparing the book, intended to serve four
purposes: (1) to identify recurrent patterns in and some of the "causes" of violent
crime; (2) to provide illustrative case studies of the kind of investigation made
possible by comparative research on violence; (3) to furnish a large data set; and (4)
to present aseries of guidelines. The authors have succeeded in fulfilling the aims
3 and 4, only partly succeeded in addressing aim 2, and failed in achieving the first
aim (actually the authors should not have even tried to identify "causes" from such
overly aggregated data).
The first three chapters deal with the "Need for a Comparative Approach", the
"Comparative Crime
Data
File", and "Problems and Prospects in Comparative
Crime Research".
The
authors suggest that "without knowledge of the experiences
of other societies, we are greatly limited in
our
ability to anticipate the effects of
changes within
our
own society". Unfortunately while meticulous in some respects,
the book is full with such unduly confident assertions. Systematic research on
homicide, the authors say, has been limited chiefly to the United States and the
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