Prisons of Poverty L. Wacquant. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press (2009) 232pp. £15.00pb ISBN 978-0-8166-3901-4

Book ReviewsWe begin this set of book reviews with sequenced contributions from David Wilson andVanessa Barker relating to the work of Loïc Wacquant, whose books Punishing the Poorand Prisons of Poverty have generated both excitement and controversy. Criminology hasundoubtedly benefitted from Loïc Wacquant’s inputs – as he traverses the boundariesbetween searching theoretical analysis and wide-ranging empirical findings, andbetween politics, policy and practice and discursive disciplinary fields. In a context ofUK-based riots and looting and populist and punitive stances in relation to the sentenc-ing of rioters and protestors (August 2011) we might expect interest in the work ofWacquant to intensify – as he charts an inextricable link between the ascendency ofneoliberalism and the rise of the penal state. The works of this sociologist, Wacquant, arehugely important. The two reviews that follow offer some useful insights into theintellectual resources proferred within. We are most grateful to Vanessa Barker whosereview is based on an ‘author meets critic’ session at the American Society of Criminologyconference in November 2010. In the spirit of ‘author meets critic’ we will be invitingLoïc Wacquant to respond to these reviews in a future issue of the journal.

LORAINE GELSTHORPEBook Review EditorHoward Journal

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity L. Wacquant. Durham,NC.: Duke University Press (2009) 384pp. £16.99pb ISBN 978-0-8223-4422-3

Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor, first published in English in 2009, and in French in 2004,is now so well known – even celebrated – as not to require too detailed a traditionalreview in these pages. Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to ask questionsabout where his trenchant analyses might be leading us – and by ‘us’ I mean both theUSA and England and Wales, the academy and civil society – based on some of his otherrecent writings, developments since the ‘banking crash’, and to start this review inparticular to champion the research methods that he used, and which formed thebackdrop to Punishing the Poor.

Let me start by telling a story. Two years ago I was in discussion with one of thiscountry’s most noted professors of criminology, and describing to him a recent visit thatI had made to some maximum-security units within a prison near to where I live, andhow they compared – not very favourably – with other units that I had visited over thecourse of a number of years. I noticed that my conversation was making my academiccolleague, who regularly writes about punishment, rather uneasy, until he eventuallyadmitted to me that he had actually never set foot inside a prison. As might be imaginedI was somewhat stunned, even allowing for the fact that my own background has givenme a number of advantages in gaining access to prisons in this country and abroad. Howcould he, I thought, write or know anything about how punishment is experienced if hehas never walked through the prison’s gates, heard the clink of the prison officer’s keys,smelled that rotting smell of humans placed in too close proximity to one another, or

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546© 2011 The AuthorsThe Howard Journal of Criminal Justice © 2011 The Howard League and Blackwell Publishing LtdPublished by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

watched helplessly as the pain and misery that prison produces is played out before hiseyes?

Punishing the Poor charts the USA’s love affair with the penal estate, and its spectacularfalling out with the social state. It describes in graphic detail the criminalisation ofpoverty, and the rampant individualism and social Darwinism that now dominatesAmerican society and which has resulted in, for example, government expenditure onpublic housing falling by more than half between 1980 and 1990, during which timespending on operating prisons increased almost fourfold to $26.1 billion. It describeshow there are more Californian corrections officers than IBM employees; how ‘correc-tions’ has become the third largest employer in the country; and how ‘the carceralarchipelago’ is now the fourth largest ‘city’ in the United Sates, after New York City, LosAngeles and Chicago, but with more people locked up than live in Houston, Philadel-phia, Phoenix, San Deigo, Dallas or Detroit. Sometimes facts really do speak forthemselves.

Yet while these facts deliver a bloody punch to the nose, Wacquant also chooses toenter the belly of the beast, and let his readers experience that punch for themselves –albeit fleetingly – so that they can begin to feel what it must be like to be a prisoner in the‘land of the free’. Clearly based on his reflexive diaries, Wacquant takes us on a trip withhim to the ‘controlled chaos’ of Los Angeles County Jail (LACJ), where one inmatecomments: ‘when the screws beat you up you can read the brand of their flashlight onyour body’ (p.148). I know that this extract did, in fact, come from the field notes of hisvisit to LACJ because he has reproduced these field notes more fully in an article whichhe wrote called ‘The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incar-ceration’ in which he questions why social scientists have stopped visiting prisons, andthus forced academics to ‘turn to the writings of journalists and inmates to learn abouteveryday life in the cells and dungeons of America’ (Wacquant 2002, p.385).

His desire to reinvigorate field studies of the carceral world was clearly based onWacquant’s own experiences of visiting prisons, and this understanding of what he sawand noted while he was there clearly informs Punishing the Poor, elevating his analysisfrom something which might have been cold and calculating – beautifully formed in theuniversity’s library – to something altogether more visceral and primeval. It also, it seemsto me, gives Punishing the Poor greater credibility and status, because it is quite clear thatwhat he is writing about has also been experienced, and that his claims to truth telling,therefore, have a greater purchase than claims from those who want to describe andadvocate, but who have had – almost consciously – no direct experience.

In this respect, I was also intrigued by Wacquant’s recent review article about Loaderand Sparks’s (2011) Public Criminology? which appeared in the British Journal of Crimi-nology (Wacquant 2011). In this he lambasts Loader and Sparks for their failure toinclude ‘the political economy of criminological knowledge’ (p.441) and the ‘neoliberalinstitutional ecology within which criminological knowledge is now being produced,validated and appropriated (or ignored)’ (p.442). If they had done so, Wacquant (2011)suggests that they would have had to include a discussion of:

The managerial makeover of the university and the generalized degradation of the conditionsof employment, research and teaching on justice; increased dependency on external fundingaimed at short-term technical issues; the growing weight of policy institutes on campus and therise of ‘think tanks’ off campus; the proliferation of para-governmental outfits that foster andfabricate a bogus science plugged directly into the policy-making machine; the overt andcovert intrusion of tame crime in synch with the demands and cycles of a media microcosmdriven by the restless quest for audience ratings. (p.442)

There is much that I can recognise and worry about here, and in particular what seemsto be the growing intellectual insularity of criminology, which has ‘artificially sever[ed]

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the crime-and-punishment duet from the state, social space and culture’ (Wacquant2011, p.446).

How are we to reconnect crime and punishment, how it is taught, researched andwritten about, and promote the results with what is happening to our cultures inEurope and the USA? What is it that will allow us to begin to cultivate the will and toolsto make sense of the place and functions of crime and punishment in contemporarypolitical culture, and then begin to ‘cool’ – as Loader and Sparks would have it – theheat of popular crime talk and policy action? In his Prisons of Poverty, originally pub-lished in 1999, but re-published and expanded in 2009, Wacquant includes an excel-lent afterword entitled ‘A civic sociology of neoliberal penality’ in which he describes‘the tools of social science to engage in, and bear upon, a current public debate offrontline societal significance’ (Wacquant 2009, p.161). In this he charts how the bookwas translated into numerous languages, and how he spoke in various countries aboutthe issues at the heart of what was being described. In other words, what he wasdescribing was that there was a popular, international desire to resist the diffusion ofUS-style penalty, the criminalisation of the poor, and the break-up of the social state.There was no lack of popular will to resist the crime policies of ‘super-maximumprisons’, personal responsibilisation, zero tolerance policing and ‘broken windows’thinking. Rather, there has simply been a failure of the academy to have what theResearch Excellence Framework has rather coyly termed ‘impact’, although an ‘impact’which will seemingly, as far as criminology is concerned, not measure the resistance tothe penality that Wacquant has described, but, instead, be concerned with how theacademy has aided and supported that penality.

Paradoxically, at least in England and Wales, the financial and banking crises mighthave put a brake on the penal expansionism of the Conservative-Liberal coalitiongovernment, although there are also more, albeit small, encouraging signs that there hasbeen an acceptance that we cannot keep travelling in the same intellectual and punitivedirection as does the USA. As chair of the independent Commission on English PrisonsToday (2009) I was heartened, for example, that our argument for more localism andpenal moderation was widely accepted, and that several of the incoming politicians whonow run the Ministry of Justice have bought into our idea that it is perfectly possible tohave ‘less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison’. Indeed, I heard thisvery phrase being used by one politician in a policy speech, which suggests that there aresome elected officials who do not want to convince the electorate that they are ‘tough’ oncrime by ‘disappearing the poor’.

Interestingly, some of our ideas came directly from the USA. Indeed as a Commissionwe made an official visit to Ryker’s Island, and we first noted there that three of theisland’s prisons had been closed – there were simply not enough prisoners to keep themopen. Finding out why this had happened led us directly into issues related to drugscourts, ‘million dollar blocks’ and ‘justice reinvestment’ (JR). JR becomes one of ourtouchstone ideas in our final report Do Better; Do Less (Commission on English PrisonsToday 2009). And, what I found astonishing, was that when the report was published,London’s Metropolitan Police claimed that they were already engaged in JR, and thattheir version of ‘million dollar blocks’, for example, were called, instead, ‘diamonddistricts’. All nonsense of course, but this example served to remind me that we have afetish in this country to ape policies that come from across the Atlantic, even if what wesay we are doing has, in fact, nothing whatsoever to do with those policies that arepurportedly being aped!

As admitted, these are small signs about an overall policy direction change, butimportant nonetheless – especially if they gain momentum and become consolidated.Meanwhile Loïc Wacquant is to be congratulated for not only producing a body of workthat is challenging and stimulating, but also for charting the ways in which those of us who


548© 2011 The AuthorsThe Howard Journal of Criminal Justice © 2011 The Howard League and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

care passionately about the role that criminology can play in public policy might go abouttheir research, writing and teaching and their subsequent engagement with wider society.

References

Commission on English Prisons (2009) Do Better; Do Less: The Report of the Commission onEnglish Prisons Today, London: Howard League for Penal Reform.

Loader, I. and Sparks, R. (2011) Public Criminology? London: Routledge.Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass

incarceration’, Ethnography, 3, 371–97.Wacquant, L. (2009) Prisons of Poverty, Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press.Wacquant, L. (2011) ‘From “public criminology” to the reflexive sociology of crimino-

logical production and consumption: a review of public criminology?’, British Journalof Criminology, 51, 438–48.

DAVID WILSONProfessor of Criminology,Centre of Applied Criminology,Birmingham City University.

Prisons of Poverty L. Wacquant. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press (2009)232pp. £15.00pb ISBN 978-0-8166-3901-4

With urgent prose, Loïc Wacquant diagnoses an acute condition spreading from theUSA to Europe to Latin America: the pathology of the penal state. The stakes are high.Increased penalisation coupled with the retraction of social welfare has exacerbatedsocial inequality and weakened the rights and liberties of those who are poor, undere-ducated, and members of racial and ethnic minorities. Public safety and security is nowbased on social exclusion. A sharp critic of this dystopia, Wacquant seeks to explain how,and why, advanced liberal democracies face this grim reality. Prisons of Poverty is an effortto map out the social, political and economic forces that created this ‘new government ofsocial insecurity’ (p.1). Specifically, it shows how neoliberalism, with its doxa of freemarkets, deregulated wage labour, and individual responsibility, necessitates a new formof public authority that relies on penality to mask deteriorating social conditions. Whileengaging in abstract social theorising, the book is also a project in civic sociology, anexplicit effort to connect social science with major issues of public debate. As evidencedby the proliferation of academic commentary, Prisons of Poverty and its companion havealready generated much excitement, appreciation, and controversy.

This review raises three analytical concerns about the book’s (i) theory of action, (ii)causal dynamics, and (iii) comparative perspective.

First, Wacquant makes a strong claim that neoliberalism brought about increasedpenal severity, not only in the USA but across Europe. Readers could get the impressionthat one or two American neoliberal think tanks concocted this scheme and successfullyexported it abroad with minimal resistance. What is missing, however, is any sense of thedemos, the people involved that give penal policy its distinctive character and socialmeaning. Prisons of Poverty presents an unapologetic theory of elites reconfiguring thestate by themselves without the participation or input from criminal justice actors,bureaucrats, public interest groups, or other stakeholders, groups that have been shownto greatly impact the character and trajectory of penal policy in the USA and elsewhere(Gottschalk 2006). Likewise, what is missing is a sense of the nation-specific institutionsthat connect both ordinary people to policy makers and/or nation-specific institutionsthat connect economic philosophy with public policy outcomes (Lacey 2008).




Second, the claim that the diffusion of neoliberalism colonised certain aspects ofpublic policies in Europe is problematic for two reasons: (i) It assumes the hegemony andcoherence of neoliberalism without taking into account how global forces are oftenmutated and reconfigured to fit local culture, glocalisation. It does not consider howneoliberalism may have been put into action differently by nation-specific institutionsand practices. (ii) It assumes that the causal dynamics in the penal field were determinedby outside forces, exogenous factors. It overlooks the internal dynamics of particularnation-states which may be converging on similar outcomes, increased penality, butdiverging on causal mechanisms. In places like the Netherlands, Denmark, and to someextent, Sweden, increased criminalisation and penalisation, particularly of foreignersand perceived others, may be driven by the reassertion of national sovereignty andnational belonging. The prison, an expressive policy instrument, is one way in whichweakened states reassert their control over a territory and population (Garland 1996).With the rise of neonationalism, far right parties and xenophobia, we see the merging ofanti-crime politics with fear and anxieties about foreigners, perceived to be underminingsocial cohesion. In this discourse, European welfare states are supposedly threatened byforeigners and multiculturalism. Europeans want to preserve social welfare but exclu-sively for those thought to belong: natives. Ethnoracial domination may be a morepotent causal mechanism than the spread of American neoliberalism, a mechanismWacquant (2008) develops elsewhere in Urban Outcasts.

Third, as made apparent in the first two criticisms, Prisons of Poverty could have donemore with its comparative cases. Here the comparisons are used to evidence convergencebut are not developed enough to identify causal mechanisms of divergence or variation insocial meaning. Of course, going down this route would disrupt the appealing parsimo-niousness Wacquant’s account achieves in its forceful critique of neoliberalism.

References

Garland, D. (1996) ‘Limits of the sovereign state’, British Journal of Criminology, 36,445–71.

Gottschalk, M. (2006) The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration inAmerica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lacey, N. (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in ContemporaryDemocracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality,Cambridge and Malden, MA.: Polity Press.

VANESSA BARKERAssociate Professor of Sociology,Stockholm University,Stockholm,Sweden.

Parole Board Hearings: Law and Practice, 2nd edn. H. Arnott and S. Creighton. London:Legal Action Group (2010) 433pp. £30.00hb ISBN 978-1-903307-64-9

This is the second edition of a hugely useful book. The chairman of the Parole Board, SirDavid Latham, in a foreword calls it an ‘essential book for anyone concerned, in anycapacity, with the work of the Parole Board’. The book gives a detailed description of thecomplex legal world in which the Parole Board attempts to carry out its duties, withchapters on public funding and on the assessment of risk, as well as more obviously



lawyer-like chapters on determinate and indeterminate sentences, and so on. The factthat the authors are leading practitioners in the field (with Bhatt Murphy solicitors)rightly gives users confidence that this is sound legal advice. (Perhaps the authors aresurprisingly uncritical: but then they are writing an advice manual, not a treatise forreform.)

But the book also raises many questions. Why is this area of law so complicated? Thissecond edition was published in 2010. Even before the current Legal Aid, Sentencingand Punishment of Offenders Bill started its journey through parliament, we needed athird edition to deal with such cases as Faulkner [2011] EWCA Civ 349 or Guntrip [2010]EWHC 3188 (Admin) on the appropriate measure of damages for delay, and Osborn andBooth [2010] EWCA Civ 1409 on the ‘right’ to an oral hearing. It is a fast moving area:the law is so complex that the courts are frequently called upon to try to do justice in aminefield. In the long run, real ‘sentence review courts’ might be fairer, and save timeand money, compared with this current system, where the Parole Board is continuallysqueezed, despite the Court of Appeal’s decision in Brooke [2008] EWCA Civ 29, that theBoard was not a sufficiently independent court to comply with Article 5(4) of theEuropean Convention on Human Rights.

Why is Parole Board law and practice still seen (by policy makers as much as bylawyers) as part of ‘prison law’ and not as part of ‘sentencing law’? It makes no sense thatcriminal lawyers represent their clients at sentencing hearings, but then have little, orprobably no, involvement representing them on the equally important decisions taken asthey move towards release. Last year the Parole Board considered 14,159 cases ofoffenders recalled to prison during the second part of their sentence (see Parole Board2011, p.6). Many of these offenders will have been charged with new offences, and somay, under the current system, have one or more lawyers for these, and another (if theyare lucky!) for their Parole Board review, considering difficult issues which affectwhether they are held as remand or convicted prisoners, with important consequencesfor the length of any subsequent sentence. The sad fact is that they often appear betterrepresented in the police station and at trial (and even here, of course, there is much tobe desired) than they are when passing time in prison awaiting a decision from a ‘panel’(often one person) of the Parole Board, often sitting on a date not even communicatedto the prisoner.

Will all those concerned ‘in any capacity’ with the work of the Board (to quote theforeword of Sir David once again) have access to this book? Those most obviouslyconcerned are prisoners. I have recently been interviewing recalled prisoners on theirperceptions of the parole and recall process. Not only do they often not understand theprocess, they often have little access to those who can offer them reliable advice. Prisonofficers are clearly not experts, and simply encourage prisoners to put in written ‘apps’,or applications, for further information. These often run into dead ends. Probationofficers seem invisible, and solicitors hard to contact. Whilst Arnott and Creighton’s bookis, indeed, an invaluable guide, it is depressing that so many of the Parole Board’sprocesses remain so difficult to understand. Prisoners deserve a more open and account-able release system than that which Arnott and Creighton describe so well.

Reference

Parole Board (2011) Annual Report and Accounts 2010/11, HC 1363, London: The Sta-tionery Office.

NICOLA PADFIELDSenior Lecturer,Faculty of Law,University of Cambridge.




Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre J. Shailor (Ed.). London and Philadelphia, PA.:Jessica Kingsley (2011) 300pp. £24.99pb ISBN 978-1-84905-823-0

I recall that, as a young child, the words Howard Journal were among the first on myfather’s desk that I worked out how to decipher. So it’s an eerie kind of honour to beasked, decades later, and as a theatre studies specialist, to write a review for this augustorgan. Since the corpus of serious criminological research on the use and value of thearts in criminal justice settings is rather thin, there’s clearly a value in seeking interdis-ciplinary dialogue on these matters. Unfortunately, however, Performing New Lives is thekind of book that points to the gaps in the current discourse, but does little to start to fillthem.

This is a collection of new essays by practising theatre artists working in prisonsettings across the United States. In this respect it is a valuable counterpart to the similaredited volumes previously published on UK prison theatre practice (cf. Thompson 1998;Balfour 2004), and Jonathan Shailor has done useful editorial work in providing up-to-date bibliographical references. And yet, while his helpful Introduction assumes whatWard and Maruna (2007) would call a ‘Good Lives’ model of (creative) rehabilitation,this seems strikingly at odds with the book’s guest-written foreword. Here, EvelynPloumis-Devick (Florida Department of Corrections) offers a dispiritingly mechanisticset of assumptions about the role of theatre in prisons, arguing that artists need to teachother prison staff how to roll out ‘what works’ – and thus ‘ensure results-focusedprogramming and implementation consistency’ (p.14).

The book does not even begin to unpack these rhetorical contradictions, becauseof its exclusive emphasis on practitioner testimony. As such, moreover, it inadver-tently points up the inherent limitations in writing about a project that you arealso running. Arts facilitators are hardly impartial as witnesses to what transpiresunder their leadership – and nor are they necessarily in a position to read their ownprojects in terms of any wider, critical context. Those shortcomings are repeatedlymanifest in the essays collected here. They provide first-hand narratives, often quitemoving, of the challenges and difficulties faced in running theatre projects with pris-oners. Yet despite the varying geographic and institutional settings, many of thesestories start to sound repetitively similar. They provide close-ups, but not much of amap.

There is also, too often, a reflexive resort to the language of ‘empowerment’,‘redemption’, even ‘salvation’; evidence of untested assumptions on the part of thesepractitioners that what they are doing provides life-changing insights and opportunitiesto prisoners (see title). Clearly, individual lives can be profoundly touched by the chanceto explore personal creativity – and as an inherently social, dialogic medium, theatre hasa particularly valuable role to play in prison contexts. But if (to take one essay by way ofexample) men in solitary confinement are willing to kneel at their cell doors to talkthrough tray holes about Shakespeare with theatre director Laura Bates, is this neces-sarily because Shakespeare has ‘saved their lives’, as Bates insists? Might it not, instead(or also), be because they are desperate for human contact of any kind? The questionneeds at least to be asked – and rigorously – if theatre practice is not to risk participatingin punitive humiliation as much as rehabilitation.

There is a real need for objective, interdisciplinary research into the ways in whicharts practices can contribute to enhancing the quality of prison life – and perhaps evento the reduction of recidivism. But to do that, we need models that can process andcritique qualitative data acquired from participating prisoners – as well as models forexamining exactly what it is they are being asked to participate in. This book, unfortu-nately, offers neither, but that may also be a fair reflection on the confused state of thefield.



References

Balfour, M. (Ed.) (2004) Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, Bristol: Intellect Books.Thompson, J. (1998) ‘Theatre and offender rehabilitation: observations from the USA’,

Research in Drama Education, 3(2), 197–210.Ward, T. and Maruna, S. (2007) Rehabilitation, London: Routledge.

STEPHEN BOTTOMSProfessor of Drama and Theatre Studies,School of English,University of Leeds.

Offending Women. Power, Punishment and the Regulation of Desire L.A. Haney. London:University of California Press (2010) 287pp. £17.95pb ISBN 978-0-520-26191-4

Although set ten years apart, Offending Women offers powerful ethnographic insights intotwo US community-based correctional facilities. Both agencies worked with women at theedges of custody, many of them detained with their children. However, the focus is onadults; motherhood is addressed primarily as a site of vulnerability and tool of control.

The book’s thesis is that the precarious rise of non-statutory agencies in criminaljustice has created organisations desperately seeking unique selling points for potentialfunders. Each of the agencies in Offending Women consequently adopted transformativeideologies, filtering and shaping punitive powers through their own lens. These, in turn,shaped women’s resistance.

The first agency, Alliance, viewed the world through a prism of social needs, positingdependence as the source of all clients’ problems. With a series of vignettes underscoredby an incisive running commentary, Haney documents the tensions and difficultiesarising from professionals’ and clients’ hugely disparate worldviews. For clients – aban-doned or abused by those they loved – attention meant care; for professionals, attention-seeking indicated dependency and failure.

The second agency, Visions, worked to a model of individual deficits. In an approachHaney generously labels ‘therapeutics’, professionals broke women down throughenforced disclosure and gruelling public performances of shame, humiliation and guilt.

In each agency, clients’ resistance shadowed professionals’ discourse. In Alliance,women were addressed as a group, and resisted as a group. In Visions, resistance wasatomised, with women revelling in mutual exposure and destruction. Moreover, Haneycontends that Alliance’s discourse of social needs hinted at structural inequities; a‘responsibility’ to find a job implies a societal duty for jobs to be available. In contrast,Visions’ discourse of individual pathology offers women little hope, and isolation andmutual hatred aplenty.

If I have any disquiet about this otherwise excellent book it lies in the occasionalinvisibility of the author, particularly when writing about Visions. Although endnotesand acknowledgements state that Haney ‘frequently left [Visions] feeling depressed,defeated and angry’ (p.xii), this is not explored in the text. Nor is her identity as a white,educated academic, though class and ethnicity are emphasised as sites of division else-where, and gaps between researcher and researched are sometimes evident. Raisingthese issues might have been fruitful.

Nonetheless, this would make an excellent read for anyone interested in genderedcommunity punishment, including post-Corston ‘one-stop-shops’ (Corston 2007). Inparticular, Haney’s exposition of social needs provides a fascinating counterpoint toactuarial approaches to criminogenic need.




Reference

Corston, Baroness J. (2007) The Corston Report: A Report by Baroness Jean Corston of aReview of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System, London:Home Office.

GEOFF PAGEPhD Candidate,Institute of Criminology,University of Cambridge.

Occasional Assessors

We would like to thank the following people who have helped with assessmentsduring 2011

Michael Brookes HMP Grendon and Birmingham City UniversityLaura Caulfield Birmingham City UniversityHelen Johnston University of HullTim Jones University of WorcesterJacqui Karn Police FoundationAlison Liebling University of CambridgeAndrew Neilson Howard LeagueCyrus Tata Strathclyde UniversityMartin Tunley Birmingham City University



Documents

Prisons of Poverty L. Wacquant. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press (2009) 232pp. £15.00pb ISBN 978-0-8166-3901-4