{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02495201535508637, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0019193857965451055, 'mean_word_length': 4.666666666666667, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: The Penalty of Death

Makepeace describes the agonizing over, and eventual retreat from, class membership as a mitigating factor in criminal sentencing. The description of ideological acrobatics over such questions is tedious at times. Leading Soviet theorists, Roginskii and Karnitskii tell us that crime is a "class conception" and is "caused by the class structure of society". "Before the appearance of classes and the development of the state ... there was no crime." Yet at the same time Stalin was informing the populace that "there are no longer any antagonistic classes in society." (p 167). And so we are told of the rationalizations prevalent at different times to explain how crime could be so prevalent when there were no antagonistic classes. There is some interest for criminologists in the account of the history of criminology in the Soviet Union as a discipline even more captive to the ruling class than it is in the West. The central thesis of Soviet criminology has always been that crime is caused by "vestiges of the past", by bourgeois ways and habits which are yet to be rooted out. With time, this line has been softened somewhat. While "vestiges of the past" remains the mainstay of Soviet criminology, it is no longer the sole explanation discussed. For criminologists who are not interested in Marxism for its own sake, this book has little to offer. For scholars of Marxism, it has some useful data on the types of problems which must be confronted in attempts to reconcile political theory with administrative practice.