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of the women in them, and the issues of public perception, crime policy, andsocial issues that feed prisons at increasing rates. All of those threads are inWatterson’s book, and she even states at the beginning that “while the publicperception is that there has been an increase in violence and drug use amongwomen, there has in fact been either no change or a decrease in violent crimescommitted by women” (xviii). But she doesn’t follow up on the implicationsof such a statement, by considering, for instance, how “the legitimacy ofimprisonment rests . . . upon gender” and modes of resistance availableto women both in prison and in the larger society (Bosworth 5). Even thesubtitle of her book, “Inside the Concrete Womb,” implies an agency deniedto prisoners and granted to some exterior parental force.Women in Prisonpredominantly features an obsessive rhetoric of victimage by prisoners, anexploitation of their voices that generates the reader’s knee-jerk sympathy,but may limit understanding of the complexity of justice issues. Wattersonis strangely uninterested in exploring issues of prisoners’ identity that might“locate the prison within the broader society” (Bosworth 11). The poignantanecdotes & stories assume a stability of identity that functions well as asound bite but doesn’t grant the women an identity beyond that which isenforced by, or linked to, imprisonment.

Watterson’s book is, however, a valuable introduction to the world of wom-en’s prisons, especially for introductory courses where students may not befamiliar with the issues related to women in prison.Women in Prisonis alsoto be lauded for its broad goal of generating awareness, for the poignancyof the inmates’ testimonies, for the author’s amply evident fondness for thewomen, and for the thoroughness of her research.

Notes

Bosworth, Mary. Resistance and compliance in women’s prisons: Towards a critique of legiti-macy.Critical Criminology7: 5–19, 1996.

Hamilton College, Clinton, NY Susan Ross

Maurice Punch,Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct(Sage,1996), pp. xiii + 299, ISBN 0-8039-7604-6; Mark Hampton,The OffshoreInterface: Tax Havens in the Global Economy(Macmillan, 1996), pp. x +272, ISBN 0-333-61697-9 (alk. paper).

To understand the social embeddedness of deviant and criminal businessbehaviour it is essential to grasp that the business organisation is the weapon,

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the means, the setting, the rationalisation, the offender,andthe victim . . . theorganisation is the villain; our inability to control it is the essential messageof this book and that represents a substantial challenge for society (Punch, p.214).

Thus Maurice Punch brings his intellectual vigour to a subject of growingacademic interest and produces a book of depth that must become requiredreading on all business crime, corporate responsibility and managementethicscourses.

What he addresses is the conundrum that one well-known businessmanasked in 1971: ‘Why do normally responsible men commit business crime?’Since the question was asked by John de Loreon, the obvious answer may beindividual opportunism and the triumph of apparent entrepreneurial enterpriseover common sense and accountability. What Punch reflects is the argumentthat business operates at two levels; “the ‘myth system’, which publiclybolsters institutional values, and the ‘operational code’, which is covered insecrecy and which is concerned with how things are actually done” (Punch,p. 21).

For the latter he takes Dalton’s suggestion that the “finesse of workableillegalities as part of the daily reality – the pressures, expectations, and mutu-al agreement – of people trying to survive, to succeed, or simply to get thingsdone without making waves” (Punch, p. 217). The world of business ‘sotto-governo’, of cutting corners and controls for the sake of business continuityand competition, is well-documented in a series of case-studies that underlineemphasise his corporate deviance framework. Each case-study is intended todraw out the lessons of both causes and consequences with generic applica-bility to management thinking and corporate cultures. He concludes on themeans to monitor and deter deviance although these may be constrained bycircumstance and context that promotes criminogenic activity such as, forexample, the use of offshore tax havens by multinationals to avoid taxation.

That businesses use havens, and countries tolerate their financial and geo-graphic proximity, is part of that underworld in which there is flexibility forfinancial capital “to operate and expand, through minimal regulation, low orno tax, bank secrecy and political stability” (Hampton, p. 94). Hampton’swell-researched and measured text describes the development of offshorefinancial cultures that are not just the black holes for hot money and off-the-books government deals but a significant part of the international financialsystem with which nation states have developed uneasy, informal symbioticrelations. Detailing which they are, how they work, how they operate withnation states, taxation and regulation regimes (Jersey provides the main case-study), Hampton looks at both the benefits and disadvantages of havens, andthe growth of more havens, before suggesting that changes to business and

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technology ensure their permanence. Whether they tilt toward being a forcefor good or bad depends much on the criminogenic aspects of business andboth these books provide significant contributions to the research on theseaspects.

Liverpool John Moores University Alan Doig

Richard Mowery Andrews, ed.,Perspectives on Punishment, an Interdisci-plinary Exploration(New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. viii + 200. $ 44.95.ISBN 0-8204-1791-2.

This compilation of interdisciplinary essays originated, as its editor tellsus in his “Preface”, in a conference on “Punishment: Meanings, Purposes,Practices” held at Columbia University in 1990. In important respects, the textdelivers what it professes in its title: a multifaceted look at the origins, aims,and practices of punishment not only in Western tradition but in short glimpsesat Islamic and Chinese cultures as well. Beginning with a three-chapter sectioncalled “Cultural Traditions”, then moving through three essays on eighteenthand nineteenth punishment “Practices” and finally a section of four chapterstitled “Issues in Contemporary Ethics and Jurisprudence”, the collection ofessays manages to analyze punishment, its manifestations and its motivationsin various cultures, in particular historical contexts, in literary texts and inpsychoanalytical practice. The contributors list reflects this interdisciplinaryapproach in its inclusion of writers as various in background as Lois G.Forer (a former judge in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia) andStephen Marcus (Delacorte Professor of English and Comparative Literatureat Columbia University), though the vast majority of contributors come fromacademic institutions and disciplines. In general the book is nicely organized,effectively indexed, and certainly accessible to readers from a wide range ofinterests, backgrounds and degrees of expertise.

At the same time, however, it may be precisely this wide coverage andaccessibility that renders the book unsatisfying to those with a more schol-arly – or at least more formal – interest in the idea of punishment. Otherthan in chapters one and three, the book contains virutally no discussion ofnon-Western punishment practices or perspectives, and throughout the textchapters vary greatly in both length and research sophistication. Essays withsparse footnoting and heavy reliance upon only one or two primary texts(Bernard Weiss’s “Punishment, Retribution and Justice in Islamic Theologyand Jurisprudence”, and Marcus’s “Dickens and the Representation of Pun-ishment”, for instance) make the text of limited utility to scholars of Westernconceptions of punishment, too. This is not to suggest that the ideas of Weiss,

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