Genoa, Italy. It explores the intersection of migration and criminal law, drawing upon research from a range of countries including Italy, UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany and USA. In the opening chapters Palidda sets out key features of the context including the fact that foreign nationals are imprisoned at a higher rate than domestic nationals. In Europe, this ranges from two or three times higher in UK, France, Germany, Spain and Scandinavia; to seven or eight times higher in Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal –— and twelve times higher in Greece. Palidda argues that this rate of imprisonment is disproportionate to any difference in crime rates and is deeply embedded in the history of these countries, dating back over the last two centuries. Rather than being about crime, Palidda argues that the criminalisation of migration is ‘a most elementary mechanism of social control, emerging as being useful, if not indispensible, to the solidity and/or realignment of political cohesion’ (p.1). In other words, migrant groups are relatively weak and therefore a convenient group to scapegoat and target through media, politics, state and non-state institutions and everyday behaviours as a means of generating support and consensus. From this perspective, migrants have become the new ‘undeserving’ and ‘dangerous classes’, against whom the majority can draw together to protect themselves. This analysis is rooted in critical or radical criminology which is particularly concerned with power and inequality. As with much 1. 58 of the most challenging new critical criminology, it not only addresses criminal justice system but also other forms of formal an informal control and also highlights the often unreported behaviours and values of the powerful. The book goes on to explore in detail the operation of migration controls and criminal justice in a number of Western liberal democracies. With some depressing consistency, these chapters identify a pattern repeated across nations at a macro and micro-level. A particular feature of this pattern is a public discourse based upon uncertainty, risk and fear, and a confluence of interests concerned with the exercise and generation of power, and the everyday impact of differential practices. To the extent that these practices are replicated across a range of nations,this is presented as one of the dark sides of globalization. The theme of globalization is, indeed, central to this book. While the movement of people across nations is a key characteristic of globalization, this book asserts that a set of defensive and discriminatory policies and practices regarding migration is its corollary. Globalization is not a comprehensive and consistent set of beliefs, behaviours and actions but instead comprises a number of loose trends which vary across space and time. In each country, global trends will be mediated through local cultures and individual interpretations and choices. In this way it is more realistic to talk about ‘glocal’, a mix of global and local. This is drawn out in the case studies of individual countries, but is also central to a particularly fascinating chapter by Alessandro Dal Lago, based at Genoa University, who explores the historical and philosophical underpinning of concerns about migration. Dal Lago challenges Samuel Huntington’s analysis of a ‘clash of civilisations’1, which asserted that history is characterised by power struggles between different belief systems or national states. Dal Lago’s thesis is that rather than being fixed, rigid and impermeable, cultures are organic. From this position, Dal Lago argues that concerns about migration are not rooted in fears about differences between cultures and clashes between different beliefs, but instead because they present an alternative idea of hybridization and threaten the very idea that nationhood and identity are intertwinned and certain. Migration is a threat because it brings change, adaptation and integration rather than because it brings conflict and discord. It is in challenging old certainties rooted in place and time that migration brings to life the realities of a changing globalized world. This book is to be applauded for exploring migration from a novel perspective, drawing together both the global and the local. It is in examining these intersections that the book brings new insights whilst also highlighting some of the deeply concerning issues of power and inequality that exist in the worlds richest nations. Dr Jamie Bennett is Governor of HMP Grendon and Springhill. Huntington, S. (1996) The clash of civilisations and the remaking of world order New York: Simon & Schuster. Prison Service Journal Issue 204