Cadenza: A professional autobiography

This book provides a fascinating insight into the singular career of one of the world's best-known sociologists working on questions of penal and social control. (Emma Bell, Professor of British Politics, Université de Savoie Mont Blanc)

This book will fascinate and energise academics who, like Thomas Mathiesen, seek to ensure that all citizens are accorded justice, are treated humanely and with the dignity they have a right to expect, especially the condemned and the marginalised. (Roger Hood, Professor Emeritus of Criminology, University of Oxford)

Mathiesen is a transgressor amongst transgressors, a noble subversive amongst subversives. His is an 'unfinished' (his term) call to action, like this splendid autobiography which will never 'finish' to inspire us and the future generations. (Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University, author of Penal Abolitionism)

Cadenza is an insightful and engaging read from one of the most distinguished penal abolitionists. (Helen Elfleet, Graduate Teaching Assistant -Edge Hill University)

This important book deserves wide readership. (David Scott, The Open University)

Mathiesen, who now we know experienced the material and social consequences of war, and lived and reacted against knowledge colonisation, presents us now with Cadenza and its science of opposition. Understanding the epochs in which this science from below developed is a welcomed and urgent source of inspiration for all the regions of the world that host immense numbers of marginalized people that science should desperately listen to. (David Rodríguez Goyes, PhD student, University of Oslo; and researcher, Universidad Antonio Nariño, Colombia)

Thomas Mathiesen's lifelong combination of research and activism, through both the prisoners' rights movement KROM, part of the groundwork for the European Group, and otherwise, is here rigorously documented in a most inspired and engaging way. This book will be a huge inspiration for ongoing efforts, struggles and work yet to come within Mathiesen's main focus areas; most importantly through the science of opposition, abolitionism, action research and perspectives from below. (Ida Nafstad, Co-ordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control)

In radical criminology, Thomas Mathiesen is the oppositional thinker non plus ultra - the scholar-activist who gave us the concepts of "the competing contradiction" and "the unfinished" and showed us how to deploy them in radical penal reform. In this compelling memoir, Mathiesen traces the intellectual, institutional and personal struggles out of which these concepts emerged. A singular work by a singular sociologist. (David Garland, author of The Culture of Control)