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Review: Punishment and Prisons: Power and the Carceral State

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 March 2010
Date01 March 2010
Author Hindpal Singh Bhui
DOI10.1177/02645505100570010103
Subject MatterArticles
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Hudson proposes cosmopolitan justice as a means of reconceptualizing the excluded
other of nation-state justice.
Overall, this book is an important contribution to contemporary debates on
penal practice and policy, and as such will be invaluable to both practitioners
and academics. Contrary to the sometimes pessimistic implications drawn from
Lacan’s theory of the imaginary – the subject can never fully translate itself from its
imaginary state to full refl exive consciousness – the overall emphasis of the book
is positive. Many of the articles are optimistic that at least some of those excluded
discourses can be recovered.
In a letter to his student, Roberto Unger2 wrote that blindness towards alternative
possibilities not only excludes other possible choices but is in itself a mutilation. In
choosing one social vision to the exclusion of all others we cast aside other aspects of
our humanity. According to the authors of Imaginary Penalties, recent penal policy
and practice, particularly those relating to risk and actuarial modes of governance,
have sought to close off, alternative, more imaginative discourses on justice and
penal practice. However, as Unger argues, in order not to completely cast off these
other aspects of our humanity we must somehow fi nd ways of learning to feel the
movements of the limbs that we have cut off. To learn how to do that, argues Unger,
is the work of the imagination.
Notes
1 Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits. London: Norton.
2 http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/english/docs/passion2.doc
Bill Munro
Lecturer in Criminology, University of Stirling
Punishment and Prisons:
Power and the Carceral State
Joe Sim
SAGE Publications, 2009; pp 200; £21.99, pbk
ISBN: 978–0–76196–004–1
Does abolitionism have relevance in a nation (and world)
where the use of imprisonment has such a strong hold on
penal thinking and policy? This fl uent and coherent crit-
ique of the evolution and implementation of current penal
policy argues...

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