Book Review: Skotnicki, A. (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, viii, 165pp

• Author: Kent R. Kerley
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567709335889
• Published date: 01 September 2009
• Date: 01 September 2009

Part 4 focuses on ‘‘Identities, Cultural Practices and Drugs,’’ and in its opening chapter, ‘‘Echoes

of drug culture in urban music,’’ Olyinka Esan argues that musical subcultures remain important

ways through which youth shape their identities, and that popular music can provide a window onto

the shifting terrains of drug use. And in the next chapter, ‘‘Drugs and identity: Being a junkie mum,’’

Sarah Dalal Goode’s research participants—48 women who struggle to balance their identities as

both mothers and drug users—reveal a striking paradox at the center of their lives: they hope to

be counter-role models to their children, providing, in effect, examples of what not to be.

In chapter 13, ‘‘Women, drugs and popular culture: Is there a need for a feminist embodiment

perspective?’’ Elizabeth Ettorre argues that women drug users are often treated as abio-underclass

who represent the ‘‘polluted body’’ par excellence. To resist such representations, Ettorre advocates

for a ‘‘resurrection of the body in our work and the breathing of ‘epistemological’ life back into our

neglected [symbolic] frames’’ (236). In chapter 14, ‘‘The drugs of labour: The contested nature of

popular drug use in childbirth,’’ Laura Hu

¨bner focuses on the legal consumption of drugs in child-

birth, suggesting that the choice to take pain-relieving drugs is part of a complex intersection of

meaning in which the religiously-conferred importance of experiencing pain and suffering continu-

ally confronts the fears of that very pain.

The book’s last section, ‘‘Drugs, Normalisation and Popular Culture: Implications and Policy,’’

also comprises the book’s last chapter, ‘‘Systemic ‘normalisation’?—Mapping and interpreting

policy responses to illicit drug use.’’ In it, Richard Huggins answers the normalization thesis in the

affirmative, arguing that recent criminal justice responses to drugs—large-scale, interagency, and

strategic—clearly indicate a pervasive belief that drugs have indeed become normalized.

To conclude, windows into the drug debates of others are important, especially given an increas-

ingly interconnected world in which concerns about cross-border flows continue to grow. The same

elements that make this volume interesting, however, also highlight its main weakness: Where, one

might ask, is this interconnected world—its structures, contradictions, possible benefits, and hierar-

chies? Although there are brief suggestions of a larger, unequally structured world outside of the

United Kingdom throughout the book, the (post)industrial scaffolding undergirding the issue of drug

normalization remains underanalyzed, almost as if such processes occurred primarily through free-

floating forms of mediation. In effect, the volume is an interesting, but perhaps incomplete analysis

of an important issue with global resonance.

Dimitri A. Bogazianos

California State University, Sacramento

Skotnicki, A. (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church.

Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, viii, 165pp.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567709335889

Faculty teaching courses in criminal justice, law, and corrections long have taught students about

the influence of various religion traditions in the creation of penal law and the criminal justice sys-

tem in the United States. In particular, Catholic Church doctrines served as a template for our system

of penal law, informed the logistics and function of the courtroom, and served as a guide for the

philosophy and structure of the penitentiary system. In Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church,

Andrew Skotnicki provides an in-depth examination of the role of the Catholic Church in the cre-

ation and operation of the criminal justice system. This monograph provides a more focused view

of the nexus between the Catholic Church and the criminal justice system than Skotnicki’s previous

Book Reviews371