Cheap on Crime: Recession‐Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment. By Hadar Aviram. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. 272 pp. $29.95 paper.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12175
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015

disparities—but the peculiar ways those vices have married our cul-

tural virtues in the criminal justice realm—equality, individualism,

and mistrust of government.

The book’s penultimate chapter is perhaps its most important

one for Law & Society readers. Interdisciplinary studies of law are all

too often associatedwith bringing social and psychological realism to

the understanding of legal processes and, thus, understanding how

the promise of equality and fairness in the law’s majestic documents

so often fails to be delivered on the street. Yet as much as we need to

highlight those multiple sources of bias (implicit and explicit), the

great evils ofAmerica’s criminal justicesystem are profoundly onesof

law itself, intended and carried with deliberation and efficiency by a

vast army of state functionaries. Ferguson points to the significance

not only of our laws but also of our strong version of legalpositivism,

that is, our strongcultural investment in the idea oflegality as a suffi-

cient basis for legal legitimacy without regard to moral or political

dimensions,in enabling the active complicityof so many thousands of

professionalsin carrying out cruelty onsuch a massive scale.

Although Ferguson’s personal narrator voice and the literary

nature of his references make this book quite different from almost

anything else published on the problem of contemporary American

punishment, his conclusions are highly consistent with the growing

view that holds mass incarceration to be a moral catastrophe for

American law and society on par with our most disgraced institu-

tions. That recognition is opening the possibility for a new conver-

sation about crime and justice in America. Ferguson’s direct and

eloquent language and his relentless moral framework will be cru-

cial to advancing that conversation beyond the bromides of criminal

justice reform.

Reference

Brown v.Plata, 563 U.S. 93 (2011).

***

Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of

American Punishment. By Hadar Aviram. Oakland, CA: University

of California Press, 2015. 272 pp. $29.95 paper.

Reviewed by Christine S. Scott-Hayward, School of Criminology,

Criminal Justice, and Emergency Management, California State

University, Long Beach

1034 Book Reviews