Being and Becoming an Ex‐Prisoner, by Diana F. Johns. London: Routledge, 2018.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12427
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Published date: 01 September 2019

accountability norm is an important intervention into transitional

justice scholarship and practice.

Both authors recognize and confirm the central role of law in

response to mass atrocity. Rowen concludes: “Truthcommissions are

now understoodas a complement to prosecutions, if not a precursor,

and mobilizing around one further contributes to the anti-impunity

agenda, for better or worse” (150). For Aboueldahab, limited judicial

capacity and weaklaws contribute to ineffectiveor nonexistent pros-

ecutions in all four of her cases, which leads her to call for capacity

building for judiciaries prior to any transitional justice efforts. As

these volumes demonstrate, legal and quasi-legal responses to mass

violence and human rights violation are increasingly treated as nec-

essary and expected, even if certain exceptions apply, but responses

in the name of transitional justice are ultimately insufficient. Transi-

tional justice canbe viewed as a continuously constituted idea or as a

narrow, well-established theory; yet, it is mostly a series of experi-

ments none of whichfully meets the anguished needs thatprompted

it and none of which adequately protects against extraordinary

harms in the future.

***

Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner, by Diana F. Johns. London:

Routledge, 2018.

Reviewed by Alessandro De Giorgi, Department of Justice Studies,

San Jose State University

“I don’t see it as re-integration because I wasn’t integrated to begin

with” (139). This powerful statement, shared by an Australian for-

mer prisoner with author Diana F. Johns and included in her book

Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner, effectively summarizes the para-

doxical nature of so-called “prisoner reentry.” Coined in the United

States in the early 2000s, when the catastrophic social costs of mass

imprisonment finally started to draw the attention of some reform-

oriented politicians and policy makers, the term describes the diffi-

cult process of returning to free society after incarceration. The

emerging reality of prisoner reentry has inspired a growing body

of literature, focused on documenting the challenges faced by for-

merly incarcerated people as they navigate their way back t o a soci-

ety that—even before it warehoused them in prison—had often

already confined them at the bottom of the racial and class

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