Cara Jardine, Families, Imprisonment and Legitimacy: The Cost of Custodial Penalties
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745211003278 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Lisa Mary Armstrong |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
between the institutional setting and actual policies. Yet, this perspective comes with
natural pitfalls: the clear-cut categories and concepts, the search for causal mechanisms
as well as much of the quantitative data run the risk of being somewhat simplistic and
artificial. However, Wenzelburger successfully avoids that danger in three ways: first,
he uses an impressively refined and encompassing theoretical framework and examines
strategically-acting political parties, second, in including policy feedback
Wenzelburger incorporates the impact of prior political debates and decisions and over-
comes the simple concept of a “given”public opinion and last, he is admirably transpar-
ent in discussing the limitations as well as the strengths of his theoretical and
methodological approach.
The Partisan Politics of Law and Order is therefore a much-needed and stimulating
addition to existing comparative punishment and society research. Its valuable analytical
concepts as well as empirical findings shed new light on important puzzles of punishment
and society research offering novel insights for a more refined understanding. In turn, it
points to further avenues for future research.
ORCID iD
Johanna Nickels https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9531-0834
Reference
Simon J and Sparks R (eds) (2012) The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society. London:
SAGE.
Johanna Nickels
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Email: johanna.nickels@fu-berlin.de
Cara Jardine, Families, Imprisonment and Legitimacy: The Cost of Custodial
Penalties, Routledge: London, 2019; 160 pp. (including index): ISBN
9780429448232, £120 (hbk)
Historically, criminological and sociological discourse on imprisonment has tended to
focus on the individual prisoner. This meant that the harms inflicted upon families
affected by imprisonment remained largely invisible. Through the lobbying efforts of
penal reform organisations and a burgeoning interest amongst academic scholarship
this is no longer the case. In Families, Imprisonment and Legitimacy Cara Jardine
explains that despite this growing visibility there has been a failure to recognise the diver-
sity and complexity of prisoners’familial relationships.
Using legitimacy as a conceptual framework the author analyses the relationship with
and interactions between the prison, its staff and prisoners’families. Jardine’s central
thesis is that ‘just as family relationships must be seen as something which are actively
constructed on an ongoing basis, so too are families’perceptions of penal legitimacy’
Book Reviews 295
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