Book Review: Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything

• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291181
• Author: Magnus Seng
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Date: 01 June 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews 177

are that as long as the state exists there will always be crime committed by government

actors” (p. 160).

In brief, the book facilitates an understanding of the limits of mainstream criminology,

illustrating the need to appreciate neglected fragments or strands of thought. Additionally,

this study makes a solid contribution toward an understanding of the dangerous banality of

current crime talk regarding terror, a discourse endowed with an unmediated and instru-

mental ontology. This analysis into the dynamics of political crime implicates social, polit-

ical, and economic struggles that reflect fundamental issues of inequality. Institutional

forms are examined in terms of their respective relationship(s) with the state, political econ-

omy, law, and culture. This highly accessible book confronts competing and complemen-

tary approaches that guide the ideological and institutional constitutions of political crime

in several national jurisdictions (United States, United Kingdom, and Canada). Briefly, this

book is a superb engagement that finally moves crime research well beyond its ethnocen-

tric borders toward a more inclusionary framework of comparative thought. The book jour-

neys beyond the academic to implicate policy concerns. This should provide some

fascinating classroom discussions. Finally, one must note that the book reads well. The rich

illustrations, typologies, and anecdotes make it all the more accessible. Its intended audience

is undergraduate students in criminal justice and /or criminology courses, and of course, the

book should make interesting reading for law enforcement practitioners as well as the pub-

lic interested in the behavior and reform of various forms of political crime.

Livy Visano

York University

Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, by Gene Healy (Ed.).

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2004. 174 pp.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291181

This book is a collection of previously published articles that present the authors’ view

that the federal criminal code and more specifically the Code of Federal Regulations rep-

resent an unjust form of government encroachment on personal liberty and free enterprise.

The book is published by the Cato Institute, which is a public policy research foundation

“dedicated to broadening the debate to allow consideration of more opinions that are con-

sistent with the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty,

and peace” (p. 174). It is edited by Gene Healy, senior editor at the Cato Institute, who

notes in his introduction that that there are more than 4,000 federal crimes contained in

more than 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code and tens of thousands of pages of the Code of

Federal Regulations with the result that “even teams of researchers – let alone ordinary

citizens – cannot reliably ascertain what federal law prohibits” (p. v11). The book is rela-

tively short (174 pages) and is divided into six chapters, each dealing with a separate form

of what the authors believe is an unjust application of federal law.

The opening chapter, “Overextending the Criminal Law,” by Erik Luna, associate pro-

fessor of law at the University of Utah, is a brief overview of the basic premise of the book,