Contributors to this important and insightful volume agree that Latin American democracies are haunted by the twin spectres of rising criminality and widespread public insecurity. Both present a challenge for social analysis. Why now? How are these issues related to large-scale socio-economic transformations and local political dynamics? What is being done about the seemingly intractable explosion of criminality? Who is to act when the very forces in charge of fighting crime are, to a great extent, responsible for it? What are the implications of inaction for our nascent precarious democracies?
Contributors use microscopes and periscopes to examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, both specific case studies of rising crime, police corruption and shared perceptions of public insecurity, and the larger implications that all these simultaneously occurring and mutually reinforcing phenomena have for the region's present and future. Chapters dissect empirically the skyrocketing of certain types of crime and the attendant perceptions of insecurity in various countries in the subcontinent, efforts (or lack thereof) to fight crime (including several interesting essays on the promises of, and obstacles to, police and judiciary reforms and on current mano dura approaches), issues of police corruption and officers' views of their own force, and the utter failure of several prison systems to dissuade, incapacitate or rehabilitate offenders, along with the related routine violation of inmates' most basic human rights.
Despite some repetitions typical in edited collections (there is no need to reiterate that crime is indeed a real issue and a shared public concern in Latin America) and a few doubtful claims (for example, that zero-tolerance policies were effective in curbing crime in New York), the volume is filled with interesting and original empirical data and challenging invitations, in the form of unsolved puzzles and provocative questions, to further investigation.
Given that the contributors are among the most recognised experts on the subject, this reader would have appreciated deeper insights into the connection between the social insecurity generated by the great neoliberal transformation of the last three decades (in the form of deproletarianisation, hyper-unemployment and mass misery) and rising crime. True, the volume editors' introductory essay and several chapters acknowledge the link, but one is left to wonder exactly how these issues are causally connected, not simply correlated. This reviewer's view may be skewed by the cases of Argentina and Brazil, but one also wonders how the dynamics of the drug trade enter differently into the causal arguments about growing crime. Similarly, one is left to speculate on how class, ethnicity and race are linked to crime and incarceration rates, and how gender operates in both variations in victimisation and public perception. This reader would also have welcomed some reflection on the impact that the ‘penal common sense’ currently dominating approaches to crime and poverty in the United States and Europe is having now that it is being exported to and adopted by governments in Latin America (in the form of zero-tolerance recommendations, for example).
One cannot (and should not) ask everything from one book, however, and even less so from a book that acknowledges right from the very beginning the dearth of good empirical data available. Much work, simultaneously empirical and theoretical, lies ahead, but this book provides a very good, stimulating, start.
