Reviews for Making Sense of Penal Change

The average rating for Making Sense of Penal Change based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-01 00:00:00 Noel Teacher I wish the book had gone into more detail about the New Caledonia colonies but it did have some very good insights about criminal justice and punishment.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-22 00:00:00 Kathryn Whaling quite possibly the best and most fully-rendered history of sexuality i've ever read. there's an over-reliance on published sources, reports, etc. (how could there not be, for the late 1800s/early 1900s/mid 1900s) but anything beyond that is splitting hairs (well, that and the last chapter, "lessons in being gay," which feels like it belongs in different but no less important book). one thing, however: kunzel does what lots of brilliant historians do, which is hammer home thematic chapter ideas at the expense of chronology and source inconsistency (i didn't, so my dissertation is a fucking mess of footnoted concessions and admissions that i have no idea how everything fits together, how could i, i'm just one person!), yet sometimes those VERY SAME SOURCES appear in later chapters, cited for this or that reason, and it maybe gives the sense that the overall narrative is much smoother than it is, even when the extremely intelligent author is of course admitting the same. mind you, the worst offender here is foucault, whose "histories" are just idiosyncratic claims that "here's a break, shit changed, check out these two sources i used to demonstrate this!", and that hardly undermines his accomplishment. i mean, after all, what we're doing is creative work, giving order to the chaos in one way or another, and kunzel accomplishes all that and more. it's a valuable book, even if other, denser, more situation-specific works will likely claim to have "complicated the paradigm" or whatever people do to perpetuate their own petit-academic careers.