Book Review: Transforming justice, transforming lives: Women’s pathways to desistance from crime

• Date: 01 October 2018
• Author: Gregg Barak
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368716682570
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Review

Book Review
Race and Justice
2018, Vol. 8(4) 396-400
Book Review
ª The Author(s) 2016
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Bernard, A. (2015). Transforming justice, transforming lives: Women’s pathways to desistance from
crime. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 144 p., $75.00, ISBN: 978-1-4985-1981-6
Reviewed by: Gregg Barak, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA
DOI: 10.1177/2153368716682570
Let me begin with a full disclosure of sorts, I wrote one of the two marketing blurbs for
the back cover as follows: ‘‘April Bernard provides an insightful investigation into
how ten women with deep criminal histories from Chicago, through their commitment
to desistance from crime and their active engagement in community crime prevention,
were able to turn their lives around. Representative of a viably emerging paradigm to
the failed wars on crime, dependent as they are on the counterproductive approaches
of deterrence and punishment, Transforming Justice, Transforming Lives, captures the
essence of the alternative pathways to reducing crime and violence. Through oral
histories, organizational and community analysis, and structural examination, Bernard
makes the case for why mutual stewardships and universal social concern are more
humane and cost effective means of reducing landscapes of crime, conflict, and
violence than are the traditional get tough approaches to street crime.’’
Before proceeding further, allow me to contextualize that Bernard’s study of
women’s pathways to desistance from crime reflects the praxis of community efficacy
and social networking that has been around since before the 1960s, within and without
the fields of social work, criminal justice, and ecological development. Buttressed by
the mental and penal deinstitutionalization over several decades and the ensuing
developments of feminist, humanist, and peacemaking criminologies, these
community-based, nonand-rocentric, if not gynocentric, or mutualistic rather than
adversarial perspectives on social interaction have provided a rich field of ‘‘self-help’’
and ‘‘professional-ex’’ groups and organizations that have confirmed the value of
networks of internal and external support for those committed to desisting from
previous lifestyles and/or identities associated with addiction, criminality, or home-
lessness, to identify three of the more obvious examples.
Within the well-established traditions of caring, peacemaking, and faith-based
servicing, I consider Bernard’s fundamental contribution to the study of transform-
ing the marginalized lives of women offenders to be her reframing of the discussion
away from the hegemonic preoccupation with the sources of deterring negatively
generated behaviors by way of sentences and punishments, and toward those internal
and...