Dirk van Zyl Smit and Sonja Snacken, PRINCIPLES OF EUROPEAN PRISON LAW AND POLICY: PENOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xxi + 464 pp. ISBN 9780199228430. £75.
| Pages | 520-522 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2010.0310 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Author | Richard Sparks |
The word “magisterial” is no doubt an over- and, not infrequently, mis-applied one. Yet I struggle to find another adjective that covers the calm authority and breadth of experience that Van Zyl Smit and Snacken bring to bear in this text. The experience in question here refers not only to the authors’ lengthy records of distinguished scholarship but also to their direct and active roles in prison reform and policy projects. Van Zyl Smit has played a significant role in drafting new prison legislation in both Africa and Europe, as Snacken has done in Belgium. It is however from their engagements with the institutions of the Council of Europe that this book principally flows, and those institutions and their gathering influence are its primary topic.
The position from which these authors write is thus a distinctive one. For obvious reasons much writing about prisons tends to fall into two distinct and seemingly mutually exclusive camps – the official and the oppositional. Van Zyl Smit and Snacken write as involved scholars rather than practitioners, and as advisers rather than activists, but they retain open channels in both directions. It requires a certain level of attunement to detect in the voluminous documentation that issues from the Council of Europe, from national prison administrations (and increasingly, they argue, from the European Union) some of the quietly consequential shifts in prison law and practice that the authors suggest have lately taken place. Their book has, in addition to its more general virtues as a thorough and precise overview of key judgments and policy statements, at least two related and somewhat original features. The first of these lies in the connection signalled in the sub-title between penology and human rights. The second is that this book is very significantly more optimistic in tone and inference than the majority of recent work on prisons; this is arguably its most controversial characteristic.
Why should it be in any way noteworthy or surprising that these two universes of discourse – social studies of prisons and penal policy on one hand, the development of human rights principles and instruments on the other – should be seen as linked or indeed, more strongly, as mutually reinforcing? It is after all possible to see even the earliest statements of principles of humane penal practice, from John Howard onwards, as depending upon and contributing to proto-sociologies of incarceration, at least implicitly, as I have...
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