Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture. By Michael Tonry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 260pp. $30.00 pb)
 Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture. By Brian Jarvis (London: Pluto, 2004, 287pp. £14.99 pb)

Extract

The authors of the two books under review could not approach punishment more differently. Whereas Michael Tonry provides graphs and empirical evidence to back up his claims, Brian Jarvis examines a wider variety of sources that stretch well beyond the usual field of criminology, to cover literature, art, film and television. Though both texts are rewarding to read, the differences between them highlight problems and limitations in each.

Predictably, Cruel and Unusual is more of a challenge for a criminologist to read. Our discipline has, for the most part, stringently avoided the postmodern turn. Despite the work of cultural criminologists (Ferrell and Sanders 1995), their constitutive brethren (Milovanovic 2003; Williams and Arrigo 2001) and a few others (Young, A. 2005; Valier 2003), criminologists appear wedded to the modernist project. At its most banal, this leads to the dominance of administrative criminology with its flow charts and policy directives. At its more invigorating, it can be liberationist and critical in intent (Young, J. 1999). At most points, however, criminologists are united by their reliance on facts and figures from the broader criminal justice system. Such an approach does not sit well with those authors like Jarvis who happily skip over disciplinary boundaries and appeal as equally to history as fiction.