Helena Machado and Barbara Prainsack, Tracing technologies: Prisoners’ views in the era of CSI
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865816640774 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Note
1. For example, in his contribution to Cultural Criminology Unleashed, Keith Hayward was crit-
ical of contemporary criminological theory that loses the city in the moment of abstraction
(Hayward, 2004, p. 155) and explicitly critiques both situational crime prevention and envir-
onmental criminology as representing ‘nothing less than the deformation of public space, the
hollowing out of the urban environment’. (Hayward, 2004, p. 163). The development of space
syntax in the context of crime prevention may therefore be understood in contrast with emer-
ging perspectives in cultural criminology, such as ‘street habitus’ (see Fraser, 2013, 2015).
References
Fraser, A (2013). Street habitus: Gangs, territorialism and social change in Glasgow. Journal of
Youth Studies,16(8), 970–985.
Fraser, A (2015). Urban legends: Gang identity in the post-industrial city. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Hayward, K (2004). Space—The final frontier: Criminology, the city and the spatial dynamics of
exclusion. In J. Ferrell, K. Hayward, W. Morrison, & M. Presdee (Eds.), Cultural criminology
unleashed. London, England: Glasshouse Press.
Helena Machado and Barbara Prainsack, Tracing technologies: Prisoners’ views in the era of CSI. Ashgate:
Farnham, 2012; 232 pp. ISBN 9781409430742, £95.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Jenny Wise, University of New England, Australia
Until recently, there has been little research on the effect of new technologies or the CSI
Effect on offenders or prisoners. The questions of how prisoners approach plea bargain-
ing, what role new technologies have played in the decision to enter into a plea, what
impact popular media has on offenders’ knowledge of crime scene management, and what
offenders’ views are on different types of forensic evidence and databases remained unan-
swered. Tracing Technologies: Prisoners’ Views in the Era of CSI seeks to address that gap.
The critical answers to the above questions are what make this book so important.
The book draws on data from 57 qualitative interviews with prison inmates in two male
prisons in Austria (collected 2006–2007) and three male prisons in Portugal (collected in
2009). Helena Machado and Barbara Prainsack were careful to recruit a cross-section of
participants, with the notable exception that all participants were male (male prisoners in
Austria and Portugal accounted for 95% of all prisoners during data collection). For
example, prisoners were included in cases where bio-information had played a significant
role in the investigation and/or trial, and also those prisoners where no bio-information
was present in their investigation/trial. The researchers include detailed notes about the
characteristics of their prisoners, including name (pseudonym), year of birth, crime that
led to imprisonment, sentence, presence of fingerprints or DNA, and also a ‘notes’ section.
This brief snapshot of the research provides readers with crucial information about how
forensics can be used in an investigation/trial and how offenders perceive such evidence.
By providing comparative data from Portugal and Austria, the authors are able to
indicate that there are ‘some shared public imaginaries facilitated by the global success of
American technocentric crime drama’ (pp. 1–2), as well as highlighting significant dif-
ferences, such as the support within Portugal, or lack of support within Austria, for a
Book Reviews 459
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