Stephen Farrall, Barry Goldson, Ian Loader and Anita Dockley (eds), Justice and Penal Reform: Re-shaping the Penal Landscape
| Author | David A Green |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516674571 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Stephen Farrall, Barry Goldson, Ian Loader and Anita Dockley (eds), Justice and Penal Reform:
Re-shaping the Penal Landscape, Routledge: London, 2016; 220 pp.: 978113819107, £29 (pbk),
9781138191068, £90 (hbk)
For the first time in nearly 50 years, elected leaders and criminal justice officials
stand before a partially open window of opportunity to rethink the misguidedly
harsh practices of Western justice systems. The very existence of this window
seemed unimaginable to many scholars in the USA and other Anglophone coun-
tries as early as a decade ago. In fact, so entrenched has the general narrative of the
punitive turn become that some colleagues remain incredulous of my own attempts
to identify, describe, and explain recent evidence of a changing American penal
climate (Green, 2013, 2015a, 2015b). Fortunately, other scholars—like the editors
and authors of this excellent book—have not just read the writing on the wall but
have produced what might be the first collection to consider what can, might, and
should be done to make the most of the opportunity to reimagine and recreate
more just institutions.
Justice and Penal Reform is an uncommonly useful and inspiring book. It is a
credit to the prescience of its editors and the Howard League for Penal Reform for
bringing together such a thoughtful cadre of scholars to address such a broad set of
fundamental and timely questions. The book answers the call of the realists
(see Matthews, 2014) who challenge criminologists to do more than critique the
myriad, all-too-well-known deficits of doing justice the Anglo-American way(s).
Many such analyses are revelatory and indispensable, but the time comes when the
most urgent questions become: ‘‘OK, so what? What do we do now?’’ This book
offers reformers heaps of ideational grist to think and do things differently.
Other credits to the book are its analytical breadth and its ambition. Another
volume without this breadth of perspective might set itself the task of discussing,
say, how to reduce prison population by 50%, as one American reform group
advocates. The authors are more ambitious because they recognize how contingent
and interrelated are institutions of punishment, policing, culture, welfare, democ-
racy, and so on. They instead ask how we as citizens in advanced democracies
might create more inclusive, more democratic, more just systems. These would
render punishment a less expedient response to wrongdoing and ameliorate
harsh punishment’s well-documented iatrogenic effects. The book reaches beyond
the reform of specific penal policies and practices; instead, the goal is to reimagine
and reformulate alternative penal regimes.
In this regard, the book’s title actually undersells the book. In light of recent
critical scholarship revealing the tendency for liberal reform movements to be co-
opted in ways that ultimately serve to legitimate carceral expansion—often via the
‘‘carceral humanism’’ (Kilgore, 2016) of benevolent intentions (Murakawa, 2014;
Schept, 2015)—most of the book’s prescriptions would transform rather than
reform how justice is done. This is evident in the recognition throughout the
book that any transformation of the ‘‘penal landscape’’ necessarily invokes
Book reviews 261
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