Heather Schoenfeld, Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration
| Author | Phil Goodman |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474518784006 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
2017)—it also has significant control over sentencing policy, a power usually
reserved for state governments. These unique circumstances make it difficult to
systematically compare D.C. to other locales. Without such comparative cases,
scholars are limited in their ability to render theoretical generalizations or causal
models from D.C.’s unique experience. In other words, while the book is descrip-
tively engaging, it offers little in the way of theoretical explanation. These critiques
notwithstanding, Forman fills in important gaps in the history of mass incarcera-
tion and offers a sobering assessment of the difficult road ahead.
References
Anderson E (1999) Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner-
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Alexander M (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
New York: The New Press.
Beckett K (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gottschalk M (2015) Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hinton E (2016) From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass
Incarceration in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Murakawa N (2014) The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Perry A (2017) Why we must save small black cities. City Lab, 24 October. Available at:
www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/why-we-must-save-small-black-cities/543447/ (accessed
5 May 2018).
Pfaff J (2017) Locked in: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real
Reform. New York: Basic Books.
Stevenson B (2014) Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel &
Grau.
Wagner P and Rabuy B (2017) Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2017. Prison Policy
Initiative, 14 March. Available at: www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html (accessed
5 May 2018).
John Halushka
San Jose State University, USA
Heather Schoenfeld, Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration,
The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2018; 352 pp. (including index): 978-
0226521015, $27 (pbk), $105 (cloth)
In a recent essay published on the occasion of this journal’s 20th anniversary,
David Garland argued that during the first decade or so of the nascent field of
“punishment and society” leading scholars managed to make splashes (so to speak)
Book reviews 379
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