Indigenous Criminology C. Cunneen and J. Tauri. Bristol: Policy Press (2016) 176pp. £48.00hb ISBN 978–1447321750

This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L'Ombre du Monde: une anthropologie de la condition carcerale.It is great that it has been translated: the Englishspeaking world remains too ignorant of French penology.As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources.Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at Princeton.He came to prisons quite late in his working life, having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology.This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d'arret (short-term prison) over a period of four years.The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on 'a world of prison'.He comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research: permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won.He explores many extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down.Fassin suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in penal harshness.After the Preface, the Prologue.It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court), with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants receive short custodial sentences.How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law.This book is dense with law.In the Prologue, 'Where it all begins', Fassin points out that 'prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole, through the fiction known as "public opinion"' (p.11).Prison is not separate from the social world: it is its disturbing shadow.Next there's an introduction offering a dose of Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society thinks should be punished.Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who is locked up, for what reason and for how long.Fassin argues that the politics of fear in recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality, so that we have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved.In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France's most confusing 'well-kept public secrets': the 'voluntary ignorance' about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in French prisons.Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.382

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