Robert Durán, Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider's Journey
| Author | Patrick Lopez-Aguado |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474514523392 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
605
Having said this, I do not want to dismiss Dzur’s book. It is an important call
for enhanced civic participation and engagement, and in an increasingly marketized
society, this is a message that bears repetition as it pertains to all sorts of public
institutions, including the criminal process. He emphasizes the important point that
civically engaged and knowledgeable people are less likely to want to lock ’em up
and throw away the keys (or cut school expenditures of Medicaid or the like). I can
certainly imagine deliberative poll guru Jim Fishkin (who is discussed at some
length in the book, pp. 108–114) charging a randomly selected group of people
with scaling and prescribing a range of presumptive sentences for a variety of
criminal offenses. And I believe that he is certainly right to advocate experimen-
tation with restorative justice and similar programs. Where he goes astray, I
believe, is when he pins so much hope of the jury trial, or more accurately the
myth of the jury in US history.
References
Feeley MM (1997) Legal complexity and the transformation of the criminal process:
The origins of plea bargaining. Israel Law Review 31: 183–222.
Langbein JH (1978) Torture and plea bargaining. University of Chicago Law Review 46:
4–21.
Langbein JH (1979) Land without plea bargaining: How the Germans do it. Michigan
Law Review 78: 204–225.
Langbein JH (2003) The Origins of the Adversary Trial. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Schulhofer SJ (1984) Is plea bargaining inevitable? Harvard Law Review 97: 1037–1107.
Schulhofer SJ (1985) No job too small: Justice without bargaining in lower courts.
American Bar Foundation Research Journal 519–598.
Malcolm M. Feeley
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Robert Dura´n, Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider’s Journey, Columbia University Press:
New York, 2013; 272 pp. (including index): 9780231158671, $76 (cloth), $27.50 (pbk)
In Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider’s Journey, Robert Dura´n develops an ethno-
graphic and...
To continue reading
Request your trial