Toward a Rigorous Unruliness.

• Date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Gilmore, Craig
• Published date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Gilmore, Craig

Tony Platt and Paul Tagaki (1977/1981, 31) argued that to understand contemporary intellectual and ideological trends of criminology required locating them "in the context of an expanding criminal justice apparatus, the contradictions of monopoly capitalism and the impact of the current economic and political crisis on petty bourgeois intellectuals." That 1970s crisis produced an unstable resolution of decades of neoliberalism, marked in the United States in particular with the massive expansion of carceral power.

The 2008 economic crash accelerated and deepened the previous three decades'regime of austerity. The crash and its long aftermath pushed carceral apparatuses, already under siege by a decade of wide and deep abolitionist organizing, into a serious legitimacy crisis brought to a head with the emergence of Black Lives Matter. At the same time, pushback against austerity has stripped many centrist, and especially liberal/centrist, parties of their electoral bases. Socialists and fascists have re-emerged as voices of the abandoned. For an increasing number of people, it seemed clear that, in the words of Edouard Louis (2019, 80), politics had become "a matter of life and death."

In the midst of the contemporary crisis, Platt offers Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States. What is on offer? Lessons, suggestions, admonitions drawn from a half century of struggle and study. This review focuses in particular on Platt's interventions into the "common sense" of our existing analytical concepts as well as his incisive criticism of reform, both of which are informed by Platt's historical methodology and vantage.

Terms like "criminal justice system," in Platt's view, have given many organizers too simple a view of what we are up against. He prefers "criminal justice institutions" that engage in "operations" (Platt 2019, 21). Similarly, he argues that we need an idea of the carceral state that recognizes it lacks coherence and is "full of tensions and internal conflicts" (ibid.,20). He insists on a historical perspective that shows us that "the past bleeds into the present" (ibid., 18), as well as grasping the frill breadth of carceral operations.

The heart of the book is a series of brief histories showing how the past shapes later struggles. Our historical perspective must, he argues, avoid a couple of traps. First, we cannot think that the present "is merely history repeating itself" (ibid., 18). Second...