Book Review: When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner re-entry
| Author | Jonathan Simon |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700414 |
| Published date | 01 October 2005 |
| Date | 01 October 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
punishment. According to Fleury-Steiner, these resisting jurors tended to empathize
with the defendant and tended to recognize how race and class play a role in capital
punishment – from articulating the role of both in capital defendants’ lives, to recog-
nizing how their fellow jurors refuse to acknowledge such influence, and indeed in some
cases may let their own race and class biases shape deliberations. Such resisters, though,
are rarely successful at swaying the entire jury toward a life verdict, and are more likely
to be bullied, demeaned and treated as outsiders themselves within the decision-making
process for challenging the hegemonic narratives held by the majority until they
succumb to the group’s pressure. In the end, it is through these mechanisms, Fleury-
Steiner infers, that American capital trial process ‘invests in inequality’.
The book’s greatest contribution is its articulation of the narrative process that shapes
capital jury decision making, particularly as told by the former jurors themselves. Their
recall of how the decision was made, how the defendant was viewed within their group,
their reconstruction of the reasons for his criminal behavior and their experiences as
resisters or as jury members who resisted the resisters reveals the complex interplay of
broader cultural narratives, the uniquely awesome demands of their role as capital jurors
and the small group dynamics that take place in such a setting. The stories of the resisters
are particularly troubling, poignant and illuminating in that they demonstrate the sheer
strength of those hegemonic narratives that tend to lead to death sentences. Thus, this
book offers the reader fascinating empirical evidence that illustrates how and why
citizens who sit on capital juries are able to come to sentence fellow citizens to death.
Mona Lynch
San Jose State University, USA
When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner re-entry, Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003. viii + 278 pp. ISBN 0–19–516086–X.
Like the practice itself, the subject of parole has been out of fashion for some time
(but see Cavender, 1982; Messinger et al., 1985; Bottomley, 1990; Simon, 1993;
Lynch, 1998). Once it was the darling of criminology; not simply one penal measure
among others to be studied, evaluated and reformed, but along with its close cousin
probation, the penal measure that most corresponded to criminology’s own wishes and
desires. From the end of the 19th century on, the emerging science of criminology
had consistently found the prison counter-productive to the modern aims of rehabil-
itation and reintegration into society, tolerable only as a necessary means of social
defense and a mechanism for assuring the realm of administrative discretion necessary
for an ameliorative and experimental penality to operate (Rothman, 1980). How much
better probation and parole, which removed the penal subject altogether from the con-
taminating aspects of incarceration, while retaining the full extent of legal control and
discretion over the fate of the individual. Moreover, while the prison might intermit-
tently employ criminology to fashion plausible tools of reformation during periods of
pressure for rehabilitative progress, it could always (and often did) fall back upon its
capacity for brute incapacitation and routinized discipline, parole needed criminology
to invent content for its always problematic account of controlling felons in the
community.
BOOK REVIEWS
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