Book review: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

incorrigible lack of conscience that acts as an inhibitor to developing and maintaining co-citizen dispositions” (p. 126: emphasis in original). She believes that this will only be a small percentage of the convicted population and uses Timothy McVeigh and Anders Brevik as examples of those who can legitimately be denied the right to vote. This is not just because what they have done are crimes (which they obviously are), but “more with the fact that they are the most harmful behaviors against a community” (p. 132). Tripkovic later develops her argument further with an interesting question: if disenfranchisement is a non-penal sanction, could it be used against those who have not broken the criminal law? She concedes that: “I find no reason not to exclude such people from the application of the restriction if both the subjective and objective conditions are satisfied. However, I also trust that this is more of a theoretical than a practical problem: it seems unimaginable that an act could be so serious as to profoundly damage—economically, politically, militarily, or in another way—a community and at the same time not constitute a crime” (p. 132). Unfortunately, even in modern democracies, there are acts that cause overwhelming social and economic harm, individual human suffering and community destruction. The perpetrators remain neither sanctioned, nor their activities criminalised. As disenfranchisement is a widespread practice in the US and Europe, albeit to different degrees, Punishment and Citizenship makes an important contribution to the literature on criminal disenfranchisement. It is both empirically meticulous and theoretically rigorous. It should be read and the thought-provoking arguments considered carefully by anyone interested in punishment and citizenship.