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Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. By Michael Jacobson. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. 292. $29.95 cloth.
Reviewed by Candace Kruttschnitt, University of Minnesota
The mass incarceration movement in this country has garnered substantial scholarly interest. In fact, it could easily be argued that this movement is responsible for a renewed academic interest in penology and the sociology of punishment. The scholarship in this area, with a few notable exceptions, has focused predominantly on how we can explain the phenomenon of the "get touch" or "penal harm" movement (Cullen et al. 2000). A political culture of intolerance, the bureaucratization of prisons, and even the rise of a postmodern penology are all thought to account for this development (Feeley & Simon 1992; Irwin & Austin 1994; Caplow & Simon 1999). Scholars who study the frontline of corrections have noted some of the limitation in this discourse, suggesting that the transformations in punishment are incomplete and often haphazardly realized (e.g., Lynch 1998). But, what has been largely missing from this body of work is a serious consideration of how we might go about changing an excessive reliance on incarceration that has swelled our prison...