The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. By Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Abstract

The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. By Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.In their most recent book, anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff consider how and policing have transformed modern societies around world and colonized our imaginations. The Truth about Crime offers a powerful account about crime, policing, and modern state. The book is a anthropology that guides reader towards understanding what precisely is different or new about and punishment in modern societies. Recognizing how and policing have become constitutive of our everyday lives, Jean and John L. Comaroff trace how crime-in particular policing as a core function of criminal justice system-are constitutive of contemporary life. With special attention on United States and South Africa, book is theoretically sharp and expansive, and consolidates their previous work on law, disorder, governance, citizenship, and postcolonial state. It is an important contribution that offers scholars across fields of law, criminology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and human rights a clear understanding about social production and increasing fear of lawlessness and criminality in societies.While book focuses on contemporary political events, authors offer a rich unorthodox historical angle and classic texts of crime, policing, violence, and power to examine how human societies in modern era became preoccupied with crime. Focusing on nature of policing, book traces relation between sovereignty (read authoritative order) and criminality, and addresses how became an integral part of societies. Stressing importance of connecting crime, policing, and criminal justice system with existing social compositions of class, race, gender, and (in case of South Africa) ethnicity, authors offer significant insight about shifting relations and triangulation of capital, state, and governance.The book is divided into two parts. Part One is titled Crime, Capital, and Metaphysics of Disorder: An Overview, in Three Movements and undertakes to offer big picture. Delving into historical processes in era of capitalism, authors trace shift in foundational elements of our social, economic, political juridical, ethical, and cultural universe with an aim to trace shift in functions of crime, policing, and, governance. The three subsections 1.1-1.3 weave in contemporary experiences of and policing in United States and South Africa. Focusing on privatization of correctional institutions that render telecommunication and financial services to generate profit and businesses for corporations, authors argue that these developments in era of high capitalism indicate the rise of penal state (45), with a turn toward managerial model of enforcing authority and order. Taking South Africa as an example to understand how structures of contemporary and policing is a global experience, authors explain public fixation on crime (49) and how this has become discursive medium (52) to speak about limits and excesses of government. …