Women Exiting Prison: Critical Essays on Gender, Post-Release Support and Survival

over arriving at definitions and categorizations that, by necessity, the authors sensibly disregard in subsequent accounts, is counterproductive for the book’s clarity and purpose. The last chapter in Part One, dedicated to demonstrating the internet’s role in enabling a proliferation of fraud in the realms of gambling and betting, contained much about ‘‘malware,’’ ‘‘denial of service attacks’’ (DOS), ‘‘botnets,’’ and ‘‘phishing,’’ but the chapter’s details were too technical and unnecessary to make the well-taken point. While the chapter on fraud in football offers a cursory overview of the German and Italian cases, the authors’ presentation of both remains superficial. Above all, we are owed an explanation as to why they chose cases in these two countries as opposed to others. The following chapter on cricket was very interesting in that it ably demonstrates how fraud in this wonderful team sport occurs in cultures as diverse as the West Indies and England, Australia and Pakistan, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, again demonstrating that the sole common denominator for committing fraud and cheating is the absolute and unquestioned sanctity of winning, which is ubiquitous. Various relatively recent formats have altered cricket’s formerly staid county and country existence and have offered new venues for fraud. The basketball chapter leaves much to be desired. There are pages and pages of unsubstantiated statements such as ‘‘in fact it [putting in the fix] thrives in the context of the naı̈ve attitude of college administrators, coaches and the NCAA and is a powerful symptom of the depth and pervasiveness of gambling in college basketball’’ (p. 124). No undergraduate’s term paper could get away with such grave accusations that remain unsubstantiated and unsourced. Under the ensuing rubric ‘‘point shaving,’’ the authors offer us an elementary introduction, but no actual case in which this has happened in recent years in college basketball (which, of course, does not mean that it has not). Just provide us with the facts, please! Under ‘‘referee bias,’’ we are offered barely a page and a half of a trivial rehash of the NBA’s Donaghy incident of 2009. Concerning the chapter on boxing’s fraudulent operations and corruptness, the reader must be permitted the questions: Is this news? And why even consider boxing, a sport massively on the decline not only in the United States but elsewhere? Why not look at its new and rapidly rising challenger Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), especially in the form of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) that has surpassed boxing in interest and popularity, particularly among young males? But the most egregious omission occurs in the baseball chapter, in which the authors present a perfunctory summary of the BALCO scandal and the Mitchell Report that highlighted the sport’s pervasive infestation with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and human growth hormone in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as Taiwan’s abuse of the age limit in the Little League World Series, among other international and domestic acts of malfeasance. Nowhere do we encounter the name Pete Rose, America’s darling, or Charlie Hustle, the man who not only was a serial bettor on all things baseball (among other things), but who bet on games played by his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, while working as its manager. Now that is the ultimate act of moral corruption; and it represents all-out fraud, as do the many examples presented in this interesting but disappointing book.