Desistance and Societies in Comparative Perspective D. Segev. Abingdon: Routledge (2020) 238pp. £120hb, £25.89e‐book ISBN 978‐0‐367‐25369‐1; I978‐0‐429‐28741‐1
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | JAKE PHILLIPS |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12447 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 3. September 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12449
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 449–455
Book Reviews
Prison in Iran: A Known Unknown N.R. Anaraki. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmil-
lan (2021) 117pp. €106.99hb; €85.99e-book ISBN 978-3-030-57169-6; 978-3-030-
57169-9
The imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has focused the world’s attention on the
conditions and treatment of prisoners in Iranian prisons; Nahid Rahimipour Anaraki’s
book is therefore particularly timely. The subtitle of the book, A Known Unknown, is ap-
posite because press coverage of Zaghari-Ratcliffe has left nobody in doubt that Iranian
prisons are brutal places where human rights count for very little. The author explains
early in the introductory chapter that she is not going to engage with the allegations of
torture in Iranian prisons but, rather,that her aim is to uncover the quotidian life of the
people who find themselves at the deep end of Iran’s criminal justice system. In doing
so, the book makes more ‘known’ the full reach of the cruelty of Iran’s prisons, as so
much of what she writes confirms the sad truth that the human imagination – when it
comes to inflicting pain upon one another – appears to know no bounds The book makes
uncomfortable reading.
This book is the outcome of research the author undertook in 2012 among women
prisoners in a facility in a large city. She followed up, but with different groups of par-
ticipants, five years later in 2017. The second set of interviews were taken in a series of
different carceral spaces, including compulsory drug treatment camps, a rehabilitation
centre, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the courts in four different cities.
On this second period of fieldwork, she ran up against the familiar problems that beset
prison research of negotiating access to prison and to research participants. Whereas in
jurisdictions in ‘Western’ countries the rules of game, constraining as they may be, are
generally known, prison research in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian systems, is an-
other thing entirely.As I know from my own e xperience of researching Russia’sprisons,
access to the field can vary according to the current political conjuncture, to the strength
of personal contacts with gatekeepers, or can bewholly serendipitous. Nahid R ahimipour
Anaraki had to draw on a wide variety of contacts and employ unrelenting persistence
to recruit research participants to her project. These came from a broad range of social
groups, each with their own specific relationship with the criminal justice system; they
include prisoners, former prisoners, recovering substance abusers, families that have a
relative in prison, men, women and their children and various other collateral victims of
the system. From the point of view of the positivist social scientist, the sampling technique
was far from ideal but it is obvious from the extracts of interviews contained in the text
that Nahid Rahimipour Anaraki was able to develop rapport with the participants whom
she recruited to her project. The result has been that she has been able to piece together
a story not told before in the academic literature.
The interviews constitute the core of the book but they follow a very helpful chapter
on the history of the Iranian prison system. In this, she traces the fluctuations of crim-
inal justice policy between reform and counter-reform over the past century, against
the backdrop of which inhuman prison conditions and corporal punishments have re-
mained a recurring and persistent theme. Despite a rhetoric of humanisation after the
449
C
2021 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
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