Book Review: Why Punish? How Much? A Reader on Punishment

• Author: Michael C. Campbell
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016811422603
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Published date: 01 December 2011
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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language and term guidelines, stages of changes, therapeutic forms, formulae, and dialogue that all
beg for tabbing and more effective graphic layout.
The handbook’s style is readable; it serves as a practical answer to some programming issues raised
by van Wormer’s 2000 scholarly monograph Women in the Criminal Justice System. In this handbook,
her portrayals of offenders reveal the complicated and disturbing realities of incarcerated females’
lives without being exploitative. She skillfully builds an insightful, logical case, addressing data that
challenge her position and equitably referencing alternative programs. To substantiate her approach
and methodology, she cites over 480 references: multidisciplinary quantitative and qualitative studies;
official statistics; interviews; case studies; and personal statements of offenders, wardens, a policy
advisor, a prison instructor, a drug court judge, and a restorative justice expert.
Conceived primarily as a professional handbook for counselors, this book clearly has value for
corrections policy makers as well as for women’s probation, parole and correctional personnel, and
attorneys or advocates working with incarcerated women. The content is relevant for graduate stu-
dents in women’s studies, counseling, social work, and criminal justice. This book is appropriate for
anyone with an interest in compassionate, effective programming for involuntary female clients.
M. Tonry
Why Punish? How Much? A Reader on Punishment New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. ix, 433
pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0195328868
Reviewed by: Michael C. Campbell, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0734016811422603
Michael Tonry’s Why Punish? How Much? A Reader on Punishment provides over 400 pages of
assorted texts on ideas about punishment with a particular focus on legal theory. Tonry states that
this compilation is intended to highlight how ‘‘ways of thinking about punishment are as much
affected by fashion as anything else’’ (p. 6). He notes that utilitarian and retributist ideas, their
many offspring and crossbreeds, have largely dominated the philosophical discussions on punish-
ment, though Tonry notes that a few contenders have recently begun to question whether these inten-
sely debated competitors are relevant in light of new ideas about human behavior. Tonry notes that
their relative prominence has corresponded to other forces as much as to the stability or persua-
siveness of their logics. As has always been the case, the...