Book Review: Tough Choices: Risk, Security and the Criminalization of Drug Policy

• Author: Lawrence T. Jablecki
• Date: 01 December 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567712475304
• Published date: 01 December 2013
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

measured in adolescents as well as adults using a combination of the Psychopathy Checklist–Youth

Version and the new Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality Disorder.

David Farrington’s Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), now over 40 years

old and still going strong, is the mother ship of Prevention Science, which examines family, school,

and developmental factors, as they impact young people’s proclivity to future delinquency and

crime. The articles in this section use CSDD and subsequent data to tackle the difficult problem

of melding various intervention programs in a time of fiscal austerity. Frederick P. Rivara’s piece

on toxic stress in the family was the best in identifying family problems. Brandon C. Welsh’s public

health article mentioned the best cheap idea, teaching parenting skills through home visits from

nurses, getting young first-time parents on the right track.

Intervention and treatment are the redheaded stepchildren of criminology but that is about to

change. With the enormous growth in prison populations and cost, legislators are looking for alter-

natives to the past 20 years of ‘‘nothing works’’ policies of maximum detention and minimum treat-

ment. Mackenzie and Armstrong’s article ‘‘The Human Experiment in Treatment’’ covers this

situation very well, along with a seldom mentioned problem in the incarceration debate—the great

number of mentally ill housed in our prisons. This section is filled with good ideas and big thinking.

Augmeri and Koegl suggest the formation of University Crime and Justice Institutes, putting

researchers and practitioners under the same roof, like medical centers. Eisner and Nivette have a

plan to reduce the global homicide rate by 75%.

As is often the case in life, the Public Policy debate brings one down to earth. James Q. Wilson

reminds us that,when it comes to predictions, we are less accuratethan meteorologists. MichaelTonry

discusses racial profiling, harsh sentencing, and a laundry list of failure. Fuel for debate is limitless.

When the smoke clears, this is an important book, a classic, and applause to all authors, editors,

and especially David Farrington. This is a book to be read today and 20 years from now.

Toby Seddon, Lisa Williams, and Robert Ralphs

Tough Choices: Risk, Security and the Criminalization of Drug Policy Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2012.

220 pp. ISBN 978-0-199-69723-6.

Reviewed by: Lawrence T. Jablecki, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567712475304

In the early 1970s, during a conference on political theory at Exeter College of Oxford University,

the writer of this review heard Quentin Skinner deliver a persuasive and controversial paper on

‘‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.’’ The guts of Skinner’s argument is that no

text in the history of political thought, for example, J. S. Mill’s essay On Liberty,hasatimeless

autonomy independent of the cultural, political, and philosophical contextin which it was written. The

authors of Tough Choices have explicitly embraced Skinner’s methodology in the mission to under-

stand and explainthe fusion of drug treatment withthe criminal justice process in England. ‘‘Itis only

through a detailedempirical study of the micro-processes of the making of recentdrug policy, drawing

on a combination of oral historical enquiry and analysis of documentation, that we can develop this

kind of nuanced and full contextualized understanding of the criminal justice turn’’ (p. 42).

The persons who give a careful reading of this book, particularly if they have experienced the

responsibilities and opportunities of managing a criminal justice organization from 1979 to the pres-

ent will agree that the authors of Tough Choices have successfully accomplished their defined mis-

sion of providing a highly detailed explanation of the fusion of drug treatment with the criminal

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