Book Review: Criminalizing children: Welfare and the State in Australia

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567718794822
• Author: Cheryl Laura Johnson
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

examined in this volume. In a thoroughly written and well-researched essay, Dean Kotlowski

discusses in detail the socioeconomic and political circumstances surrounding cases of lynching

that occurred in Indiana and Maryland in the 1930s. By covering events that took place in the

20th century and in American states that are not typically associated with lynching, Kotlowski

expands our understanding of racial violence in United States. Additionally, the author highlights

the role of the antilynching and antiracism campaigns conducted at the time by the Communist Party

of United States of America (CPUSA). While acknowledging that opportunism motivated in part the

Communist Party’s engagement in the fight against racially motivated violence, Kotlowski

also draws attention to the indirect contribution of CPUSA to the development of the civil rights

movement in America.

In the last chapter of the book, Ryan Shaffer explored the violent development of the American

skinhead subculture. Using interviews with former skinheads, rare skinhead publications in addition

to other bibliographical sources, Shaffer conducted a methodical analysis that includes a detailed

discussion of the origins of the skinhead culture in Britain and shows how the skinhead culture, the

fascist propaganda, and the racist music have been imported and put into violent action in United

States in the 1980s. The author also highlights the strong connection between a small White

supremacist religion and skinhead groups and argues that despite a decline in the American neo-

Nazi skinhead activity since the 1990s, “racist skinheads still exist” in American communities, as

evidenced by the violent hate crimes recorded in the country over the past decade (p. 202).

Although the events described in this book took place in countries that for the most part did not

share common borders, this carefully edited volume gives us a sense of historical proximity. The

selected essays demonstrate that there is no longer plausible to limit the study of lynching to the

United States. The volume not only serves to a better understanding of extrajudicial violence that

occurred in this country and elsewhere, but, indirectly, it also shows how current forms of collective

violence may be deterred. This collection of essays is an important bibliographical source for future

scholarly works discussing issues of popular justice in a historical and cross-national context.

Additionally, this very accessible and well-w ritten book could be assigned as a supplementary

reading for graduate students enrolled in a variety of history, sociology, social psychology, and/

or criminology and criminal justice classes that adopt an international perspective when covering

human aggression and interpersonal violence.

ORCID iD

Viviana Andreescu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2733-437X

McCallum, D. (2017). Criminalizing children: Welfare and the State in Australia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge.

vii, 305 pp. $99.45 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-845-65667-6.

Reviewed by: Cheryl Laura Johnson, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567718794822

Although we contend that juvenile delinquency is not a new phenomenon, David McCallum pro-

vides a unique look at this issue occurring in Australia and among the Aboriginal peoples in

particular. Across Australia, the number of incarcerated juveniles is increasing despite many efforts

to decrease it. While this is troubling, a major concern is that the Indigenous children are being

incarcerated at even higher levels than other juveniles. Both are serious issues that McCallum seeks

to address by exploring how these issues arose in the first place. Ultimately, this text challenges the

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