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48 Fla. L. Rev. 539 (1996)
The Poignant Paradoxes of Criminal Justice: A Review

handle is hein.journals/uflr48 and id is 547 raw text is: THE POIGNANT PARADOXES OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE: A REVIEW Francis A. Allen* ROMANTIC OUTLAWS, BELOVED PRISONS. By Martha Grace Duncan. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 272. It was Albert Einstein, I believe, who said that things should be as simple as possible, but that they should not be more simple than possible. The writer of this important and arresting book, Martha Grace Duncan, is not likely to be accused of oversimplification. One of the many messages her work communicates is that in the quest for penal justice things are often not what they seem, and, quite literally, we often do not know what we are doing. Professor Duncan's engagement with paradox, contradiction, and nuance is in stark contrast to the brutally simplistic approaches that have dominated American penal policy since the late 1960s-policies that overwhelmingly emphasize suppression, incapacitation, and draconian penalties. The principle that criminal punishments, insofar as possible, should be proportioned to offenders' culpabilities often has been flouted even though this principle has been a fundamental objective of penal policy in liberal societies since the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In consequence, America increasingly displays the attributes of a prison society. Today, over one million and a half persons are confined in our prisons and jails.' The total number of persons in prison custody more than doubled in the decade between 1982-1992.2 The rate of persons imprisoned per unit of population in the United States is over four times greater than in England and Wales, the latter rates being among the highest in Europe? The prison systems of California and New York each hold more inmates in confinement than does that of any nation of Western Europe.4 The number of persons under some form of penal restraint is greater than the total population of any one of twenty-nine * Huber C. Hurst Eminent Scholar and Professor of Law emeritus, University of Florida; and Eson R. Sunderland Professor of Law emeritus, University of Michigan. 1. FRANCIS A. ALLEN, THE HABITS OF LEGALITY: CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND THE RULE OF LAW 29-30 (1996). 2. Id. at 35. 3. Id. at 30. 4. Id.

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