Book Review: Unfair: The new science of criminal injustice

• Author: Matthew P. West
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016816658519
• Date: 01 March 2017
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Moving beyond the United States in Chapter 4, the authors introduce readers to selected correc-

tional policies implemented in other Western democracies. These countries are Norway, Denmark,

Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Germany. While the authors do not go into much

detail on how these countries’ criminal justice systems evolved out of their specific cultural, social,

economic, and political contexts, t hey infer from their comparisons tha t prison sentences have

primarily been used to find the best ways to reintegrate offenders back into society. This is quite

different from the United States, where prison time serves as a major disruption, during which the

alienation from family and community is common.

In the following two chapters, the authors discuss how the American political and economic

system has sustained the incarceration boom. Chapter 5 discusses the growing power of the

government in criminal justice. The authors criticize the ‘‘overcriminalization of American

society’’ due to growing pressure from political lobbying groups, the media, and the public

(p. 172). The authors lament that an increasing amount of criminal laws are passed hastily, while

older laws tend to not be repealed, leading to overlapping laws and unmanageable co mplexity in

criminal codes. They also criticize the plea bargaining process, which has put more power into the

prosecutor’s hands at the cost of the defense. Chapter 6 then turns to the political economy of

corrections. The authors address both the involvement of private companies in the management of

prisons and their role as vendors in governmental institutions (e.g., in the telecommunications,

video conferencing, and banking sectors).

In the final chapter (Chapter 7), the authors suggest reforms based on their observations in the

United States and elsewhere. While acknowledging that America’s desire to punish is deeply rooted

in cultural ideals about liberty and individualism, the authors are convinced that public officials

across the political spectrum have come to realize that the current spending on the correctional

system is fiscally not feasible in the long term.

Without doubt, Paxson’s and Watson’s reform proposals are important and necessary at a time

when criminal justice reform is used as a buzzword across the American political spectrum. Their

reform proposals are comprehensive and span from providing more access to cost-effective reha-

bilitation and education programs to substantial modifications of existing legislation. The authors

further present particularly strong arguments for a reconsideration of the plea bargaining process and

the removal of private businesses from corrections. A complete ideological shift from incapacitation

to reintegration, which the authors would eventually hope for, seems however quite ambitious, given

the unique American approach to criminal behavior and punishment. Although the authors highlight

this unique approach on several occasions, they do not provide many details on the history of

punishment in other Western democracies. A more detailed historical comparison with the United

States might have allowed for a more thorough understanding of how deep-seated penal attitudes are

derived from country-specific cultural factors.

Benforado, A. (2015).

Unfair: The new science of criminal injustice. New York, NY: Crown. 400 pp. $16.04 (hardcover), ISBN 13:978-

0770437787.

Reviewed by: Matthew P. West, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA and Jennifer L. Lanterman, Department

of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016816658519

Adam Benforado’s (2015) Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice shares a starting point with

Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish. Both begin with a snapshot of a centuries-old criminal

Book Reviews 101