Summary
Title: It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture
Author: Wendy Kaminer
Publisher: Perseus Books
ISBN: 0201488337
Pro:
• Very engaging analysis and very pointed questions illuminate flaws in the justice system and in people’s attitudes
Con:
• Some aspects are a bit out of date today, but not much would need to be changed in a 2nd edition
Description:
• Essayistic analysis of various issues relating to crime, punishment, and criminal justice
• Argues that the criminal justice system is flawed and that Americans’ sense of justice is irrational
• Argues that a more rational discussion of crime, guilt, and punishment is needed
Book Review
Written in the midst of some of these debates, Wendy Kaminer’s It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture is an extended essay or series of essays on the nature of criminal justice, crime, and the limits of imposing social order on society. A former public defender in Brooklyn, Kaminer knows a great deal about how the criminal justice system actually works — or fails to work, as she doesn’t have much faith in it as it’s currently set up.
If Kaminer’s critique of the system can be summarized in a single phrase, it would be: it’s not rational. It’s not so much that she claims that everything is wrong or that all the polices are wrong (though clearly that’s the case far too often), but that right or wrong, decisions aren’t made and conclusions aren’t arrived at on the basis of a truly rational examination of the evidence. People make decisions on the basis of ideology, or what they wish were true, rather than an objective evaluation of the knowledge available.
I suppose this is true rather broadly in society, but for it to be true about the criminal justice system where trials are explicitly founded upon the principle of a rational, objective examination of the evidence is particularly disturbing.As a consequence, Kaminer’s book isn’t designed to provide readers with any easy answers or policy solutions — on the contrary, the assumption that there are easy answers and policy solutions is part of what she’s critical of.
Instead, her aim is much more modest but nevertheless important: to rationalize the debate by asking hard questions and getting people to take a second, third, and even fourth look at things which they assumed they already understood. She asks, for example, why people push ideas about guilt and punishment in the criminal justice system while pushing every form of excuse for abandoning personal responsibility in the self-help industry. She asks why better knowledge of the law keeps people off of juries and why information from sociology and psychology are ignored in the courts.
The absence of any answers in the face of so many questions and critiques is bound to annoy some readers, but I suppose that people who want authors like Kaminer to just hand them the answers should avoid reading such books (though it’s arguable that they are part of the problem in the first place). They should stick to something that doesn’t force them to think too hard, which is what Kaminer is trying to get readers to do: by asking hard questions without also providing all the answers, Kaminer is trying to get people to think on their own and perhaps come up with their own novel solutions to the complex problems facing us.
It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture, by Wendy Kaminer
As Kaminer states early on, simple and overarching solutions to crime in America probably don’t exist; instead, solutions are likely to be multifaceted and localized. This means that the more people the are thinking about the issue — and thinking about it rationally, using the knowledge we already have but which is too often ignored — the more likely we’ll start developing realistic, effective means for dealing with crime. In effect, then, Kaminer is offering a solution — not an answer, but a means to creating answers, and that’s the process of rational thinking itself as inspired by books like hers.
In some ways, Kaminer’s book is a bit outdated because so much time has passed since it was published; in others, though, it continues to be relevant. If she were to release a revised edition I don’t imagine that she would feel it necessary to change a great deal because political debates over criminal justice haven’t gotten any more rational and knowledge isn’t playing a stronger role than was the case in 1995. Kaminer’s questions continue to demand engagement and attempts to answer them, so if you can find a copy you would definitely benefit from reading it.
