Book Review: Tracing Technologies: Prisoners’ Views in the Era of CSI

Abstract

HELENA MACHADO AND BARBARA PRAINSACK, Tracing Technologies: Prisoners’ Views in the Era of CSI. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 209 + xix pp., ISBN 9781409430742. $99.95 (hbk). An increasing amount of attention is being paid to forensic identification technologies, especially DNA profiling. This 25-year-old technology is extremely powerful, and its effects on criminal justice, surveillance, privacy, and biological citizenship seem only to be beginning to be felt. Despite this increase in scholarly attention, as Helena Machado and Barbara Prainsack note in their new book Tracing Technologies, the scholarly literature tends to be written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. They note (p. 14) that there is no book on this subject written from the particular perspective of a stakeholder group. Machado and Prainsack have chosen what might come as a surprising stakeholder group from which to address new developments in forensic identification technologies. Instead of seeking the perspectives of lawyers, judges, jurors, police, forensic scientists, policy-makers, or the general public, they offer the perspective of prison inmates. They acknowledge that it is unusual to ‘treat[] convicts as stake holders’ (p. 160). However, drawing on Science and Technology Studies, they argue that prisoners have ‘professional expertise’ on forensic identification that ought not ‘be subordinated to, or . . . ignored at the cost of, the expertise of other experts’ (p. 160). This innovative approach to gaining a perspective on new developments in forensic identification technologies was pioneered by Prainsack (with Martin Kitzberger) in an in-depth interview study of Austrian prisoners. The study design was then largely