V ol. 11 No. 5 (May 2001) pp. 226-229.

CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION by Penny Green and Andrew Rutherford (Editors). Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000. 289 pp. Cloth $70.00. ISBN: 1 84113 188 1.Paper $40.00. ISBN: 1 84113 189 X.

Reviewed by Susette M. Talarico, Department of Political Science, The University of Georgia.

In a recent issue of THE CRIMINOLOGIST, the official newsletter of the American Society of Criminology, Rosemary Barberet observes that we are only scratching the surface when it comes to the production of international comparative research on the general study of crime. This is undoubtedly true of the American community of scholars who study crime, criminal justice, and related public policy. Compounding the general preoccupation of U. S. scholars with American crime and justice are assumptions about the uniqueness of both crime and punishment in this country. It is not unusual, for example, to assert that the United States exhibits higher rates of crime and more severe penalties than other democratic and sometimes even non-democratic countries. Green and Rutherford's welcome anthology demonstrates the benefits of a more international and comparative framework and calls into question some of our assumptions about the uniqueness of American crime and justice.

The thirteen selections in CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION were originally presented at a workshop that was conducted some years ago (The specific date is not mentioned) at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Onati, Spain. This Institute represents a partnership between the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (of the International Sociological Association) and the Basque Government. At its publication, CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION was the most recent volume in the Onati International Series in Law and Society, a series reserved to papers presented at the Onati workshops that were conducted in English.

Green and Rutherford, the editors of this anthology, are British scholars. The contributing authors come from the United States and several Western European countries. Cutting across these national boundaries is an interest in criminal policy, which generally includes the substantive definition of criminal prohibitions and penalties as well as the directives that govern criminal justice agencies. At the outset, Green and Rutherford explain that this policy is slightly more than a century old and that it is undergoing a radical transformation as we enter the 21st Century. This change is multifaceted and includes "punitive trends in the realm of punishment, expansive transitions from criminality to 'sub-criminality', the extension from national to global control, the diminution of criminological knowledge in the formulation of policy by the rise of actuarialism, technological transitions which bring more and more of the world's citizens under surveillance and a global populism which has eclipsed the truths and knowledge of the academy" (p. 3). After a short summary of

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the specific selections and their organization, I will return to these themes and the collection's contribution to their understanding.

The thirteen chapters are organized into four parts: (1) Political Trends and Criminal Policy; (2) The Managerial Agenda; (3) Exclusion in the New Europe; and (4) Democracy, State Power, and Globalisation. In the first section, contributing authors Katherine Beckett and Bruce Western, Andrew Rutherford, and Pat Carlen direct attention to American criminal justice policy, especially the "law and order" campaign of the last thirty years, to similar policy crafted by Tony Blair's government in England, and to late 20th Century British policies related to youth and citizenship, respectively. In the second section, David Faulker considers the new public management in British criminal justice, Rene van Swaaningen details an ideological shift in Dutch probation, and Julia Fionda analyzes the consequences of the application of managerialist principles in criminal justice, largely concentrating on developments in England and Wales. In the third section, the contributing authors Hans-Jorg Albrecht, Dario Melossi, and Thomas Mathiesen deal with issues of immigration, migration, and labor and their relationship to criminal justice policy. Finally, in the last section, more global themes dominate in Penny Green's analysis of Turkish criminal justice, Gema Varona's profile of Spanish criminal justice, and Sebastian Scheerer's more general consideration of the future of criminal justice.

As noted earlier, several themes surface in all of the contributions, albeit to varying degrees. Of these, increasingly punitive criminal policies, managerialism, and globalisation are the most prominent. As Beckett and Western observe in their chapter on crime control American Style, the "United States has emerged as the leading example and advocate of the 'get-tough' approach to crime" (p. 15). This will hardly come as a surprise to any scholar or practitioner in this country. What may be more surprising is the degree to which other, western democracies have emulated this in punitive criminal policies of their own. For example, several contributing authors discuss legislation enacted by both Tory and Labour governments in England with particular attention to the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. Dutch criminologist Rene van Swaaingen offers an interesting account of that country's probation service with particular attention to 1995 changes from a rehabilitative to a more managerial and law enforcement strategy--changes that have been met with considerable opposition from rank and file probation officers. Other authors, for example, Hans-Jorg Albrecht (an international law scholar at the Max Planck Institute), consider criminal policy trends and especially rising rates of incarceration and examine the underlying association between crime, immigration, and punishment. Albrecht in particular argues that, "the increase in prison populations in most European countries during the 1990s has been due to a heavy increase in foreign nationals and ethnic minority members either remanded to detention facilities or serving prison sentences" (p. 143).

The expansion of criminal prohibitions, the increasing severity of criminal punishments, and the inevitable rise in incarceration rates will, of course, sound familiar to any American reader. What is especially instructive, however, are the analyses that some of the contributing authors provide. In the United States, rising rates of incarceration are surely related to the aforementioned factors but especially as they have played out in the prohibition of

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narcotics. This is less applicable in the European experience as contributing authors call attention to immigration, the effects of integration (e.g., European Union), and terrorism, among other more general factors that have contributed to escalating penalties and punishment.

In this fashion, several contributing authors call attention to the political, legal, and socio-economic context of criminal policy in what is one of the anthology's primary achievements. Of particular interest in this regard are two chapters: Penny Green's fascinating account of criminal justice in Turkey and the paradoxical effects of democratization and Gema Varona's equally interesting description and analysis of criminal justice policy in Spain. Varona's succinct review takes the reader from pre-Franco Spain to contemporary policies where the fear of terrorism plays a large role. In the process she clearly demonstrates that we cannot consider criminal justice policy without an appreciation of history, politics, economics, and culture.

A second, general theme in virtually all of the chapters in CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION is managerialism. As Sebastian Scheerer, a German criminologist, observes in the final chapter on the future of criminal policy, managerialism is "the tendency to strip the criminal justice system of moral components and idealistic purposes, and to see criminal justice as a problem of book-keeping and actuarialism" (p. 248). Other contributing authors devote attention to this theme and generally decry the abandonment of rehabilitative objectives and more idealistic purposes in criminal law and punishment. To some degree, this theme is not consistently developed, especially as there seems to be some, albeit modest, difference of opinion. Scheerer and van Swaaningen, for example, seem to decry the declining emphasis on rehabilitation in current and future criminal policy while Julia Fionda argues vehemently that contemporary concerns with efficiency, credibility, and rationalization--all dimensions of managerialism--should be resisted. In some contrast, the editors Rutherford and Green take a more muted perspective, especially in their introduction when they observe that "(c)riminal policy is not equipped, nor can it be given its essentially limited parameters, to address the wider structural and socio-economic roots of law-breaking behavior" (pp. 3-4).

There is no doubt that criminal policy in liberal democratic societies has taken on a managerial quality. There is also no doubt that with a more explicitly punitive or retributive orientation government has become more concerned with efficiency. However, the implications for criminal punishment and related policy are not as simple as some of the authors imply. Few of the contributing authors seem to pick up on Rutherford and Green's initial reminder about the limitations of criminal law, leaving the reader to wonder if a return to more rehabilitative objectives is, in fact, what they would recommend. Also, there is little attention to the simple fact that democratic governments both here and abroad are facing fiscal limitations that constrain what government can do and that require some concern with efficiency. This is not to say, of course, that cost-benefit analysis should prevail in criminal or any other type of public policy-making. However, more attention to the limitations and dysfunctional consequences of the treatment ethic and to the obvious fiscal constraints on government in the United States and Western Europe would help in the general development of the managerial theme.

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Globalisation is the third theme highlighted by many of the contributing authors to CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION. U. S. policy in the North, Central and South Americas, especially that related to the criminalization of narcotics, is an obvious example but not one that is emphasized as befits the decidedly comparative character of the anthology. Rather, contributing authors call attention to immigration and economic policies and their effect on criminal policy and to specific agreements that extend policing powers across Europe. In this regard, Thomas Mathiesen's chapter on the Schengen Convention is particularly interesting. Originally a five-nation agreement between Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Austria, the Schengen Convention regulates "a long series of crucial questions concerning national and common external border controls, police cross- national hot pursuits, police cross-national data cooperation" (p. 167) with the result that both registration and surveillance of large population groups in varied counties are enhanced. As Mathiesen, a Norwegian sociologist, notes, the integration of the Schengen Convention in the E. U. structure will provide added momentum to potentially invasive governmental infringement of citizen privacy, especially that of immigrants.

Certainly, there is little doubt that democratic governments do not operate in isolation in virtually any area of law in today's "global village." Although globalisation surely raises serious issues about record keeping, citizen registration, government surveillance, and police powers, it is not going to go away. If anything, I suspect that we will see more Schengen-like agreements both here and in Europe. Legal and social science scholars, then, cannot simply wish them away or only decry the actual and potential infringement of individual rights. As with managerialism, the challenge is to understand not only what prompts change but also how to deal with it.

CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION is a fine anthology. Contributing authors provide interesting profiles of criminal justice policy in several countries, speak to issues and themes that are important for our understanding of both crime and criminal punishment, and remind all legal scholars that law and its administration have to be studied in context, both in historical and more general socio-economic terms. Moreover, the authors clearly illustrate the benefit of more international and comparative scrutiny of criminal justice policy and administration.

With these conclusions, I am compelled to add a final, substantive rejoinder. Throughout CRIMINAL POLICY IN TRANSITION, contributing authors imply that the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots will continue to affect and indeed plaque criminal policy. This is clearly applicable to European democracies and also to the United States where criminal justice policy, and especially the war on drugs, have taken a heavy toil on the less advantaged. Even if one takes a more measured and restrained approach to criminal justice policy, it is clear that any society that ignores substantial and persistent economic inequality will face myriad social problems of which crime is but one. In this, I am again reminded of Leslie Wilkins' observation that how we respond to crime and how we punish criminal offenders are two different questions. Both merit our sustained attention.