Review of Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform

Abstract

Literally hundreds of books plus thousands of journal articles have been written about the penal system during the past 100+ years. With few exceptions, these capture neither the history nor the complete political and economic context of this system of punishment. Carceral Con is one of these rare exceptions. Whitlock and Heitzeg get the reader’s attention in the introductory chapter when they deviate from the usual discussion of the penal system by outlining several key concepts: structural inequality, neoliberalism, political economy, and especially intersectionality, which encompasses race, class, gender, sexuality, and age. In the past “reforms” have never focused on these issues or in their words “the erroneous notion that the massive harms and injustices of the criminal legal system can be reformed as a standalone project” (p. 10). In a departure from previous analyses the authors spend a lot of time discussing the growth of jail populations and...