Ochoa R, Intimate Crimes: Kidnapping, Gangs and Trust in Mexico City
| Author | Conor O'Reilly |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520952144 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
debates about rules versus discretion, or technology versus traditional court
decision-making. At times, for instance, Tata elides having any discretion with
having enough discretion, and assumes that there is room within the everyday
social construction of cases to achieve sufficient discretion for judges to achieve
justice in hard cases, even within standardised systems. Whether this residual,
practical discretion is ‘enough’ – and what ‘enough discretion’ even means – are
left as open questions. Contemporary movements towards computerised, algorith-
mic justice, and the impact of virtual courts conducted by live-link on decision-
making and fact creation, for instance, are not really considered in his survey of
technological incursions into the traditional court. Still, Tata provides us with a
starting point for action, and for prioritising what really matters in sentencing
practice, and indeed, he provides a conceptual framework with which to resist
the dystopian end points often imagined for the mechanisation of sentencing.
Tata’s book is ultimately a call to arms, an invitation to rethink existing ortho-
doxies and to broaden the scope of academic writing and thinking about the nature
of sentencing. It is written predominantly with academic audiences in mind, and
occasionally assumes that the reading is familiar with concepts from social theory
and political philosophy. However, it is eminently approachable, and deserves to
be widely read.
ORCID iD
David Hayes https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0209-6814
David Hayes
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Ochoa R, Intimate Crimes: Kidnapping, Gangs and Trust in Mexico City.
Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019, 240 pp. ISBN 978019879846,
£80.00 (hardback)
Kidnapping is a pervasive societal insecurity that has emerged as a feature of
certain complex global settings; usually those characterised by intersections of
inequality, injustice, high-crime, corruption, violent conflict, and more recently,
irregular migration flows. However, despite this illicit phenomenon’s traumatic
impact on innumerable victims and their relatives, it remains a neglected, and
imbalanced topic in terms of academic attention. This can be explained –at least
partially– by the application of a somewhat Occidental lens to kidnapping by
mainstream research. First, the limited incidence of kidnapping in developed soci-
eties has contributed to research neglect. Second, what scholarly focus has been
generated by this crime often centres on the abduction of transnationally-mobile
Western elites in hostile distant locations. This misrepresents the reality of how
444 Punishment & Society 23(3)
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