Synopses & Reviews
America's criminal justice system is broken. The United States punishes at a higher per capita rate than any other country in the world. In the last twenty years, incarceration rates have risen 500 percent. Sentences are harsh, prisons are overcrowded, life inside is dangerous, and rehabilitation programs are ineffective. Police and prosecutors operate in the dark shadows of the legal process--sometimes resigning themselves to the status quo, sometimes turning a profit from it. The courts define punishment as "time served," but that hardly begins to explain the suffering of prisoners.
Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson, a distinguished law professor, diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime. He reveals the veiled pleasure behind the impulse to punish (which confuses our thinking about the purpose of punishment), explains why over time all punishment regimes impose greater levels of punishment than originally intended, and traces a disturbing gap between our ability to quantify pain and the precision with which penalties are handed down.
Ferguson turns the spotlight from the debate over legal issues to the real plight of prisoners, addressing not law professionals but the American people. Do we want our prisons to be this way? Or are we unaware, or confused, or indifferent, or misinformed about what is happening? Acknowledging the suffering of prisoners and understanding what punishers do when they punish are the first steps toward a better, more just system.
Review
Inferno is a passionate, anguished cry against what is sometimes lamented but more than anything is taken for granted and ignored. He enlists his readers in a serious and sustained effort to reform America's prisons and jails. I know of no book just like Ferguson's. Lloyd Weinreb, Harvard Law School
Review
Robert Ferguson's Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment is a book of searing moral vision. He asks how it is that we have become a nation of punishers who can no longer see the human dignity of the punished--indeed, can no longer see the punished at all. Inferno penetrates the veil thrown over America's prison archipelago, insisting that we recognize the psychological, moral, and social consequences to the punished and punishers alike. How, he asks, have we allowed the growth of a punishment regime no less horrifying than that of the Soviet gulags? Ferguson is our Dante, acting as our guide through the travesty that is the American inferno. No one can come away from this book without a sense of their own complicity in the sin of our nation, yet with some hope that though the path forward is difficult, it is not yet completely closed. Paul W. Kahn, Yale Law School
Review
Ferguson succeeds in his aim of provoking thought in this broad assault on the American approach to punishing crime...Ferguson also manages to make the reader identify with the incarcerated, no mean feat in a society where many are more likely to view themselves as a potential victim of crime than a potential inmate...The need for punishment is not in question, rather it is the severity, and Ferguson time and again forces the reader to look deeper at an issue to which most people are oblivious...For the most part he makes a heavy, complex, and contentious subject accessible to the layperson. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
An important wake‐up call about an emerging crisis that threatens to become a human rights scandal of global proportions. Kirkus Reviews
Review
If I had won the $400 million Powerball lottery last week I swear I would have ordered a copy for every member of Congress, every judge in America, every prosecutor, and every state prison official and lawmaker who controls the life of even one of the millions of inmates who exist today, many in inhumane and deplorable conditions, in our nation's prisons. The book is potentially transformative not just because it offers policy makers some solutions to the litany of problems they face as they seek ways to reform our broken penal systems. It is transcendent because it posits that America needs a fundamentally revised understanding of the concept of punishment itself if it is to save its soul in these prisons...This book forces prison officials and lawmakers to look inward and see within themselves the dark, unremitting reasons why things have gotten as bad as they have inside our prisons and jails. It says squarely to these political and legal and community leaders (and by extension to their constituents): in seeking to bring retributive justice to bear, in seeking to diminish the prisoner, you have also diminished yourself in ways you are unable or unwilling to admit. Even today, with the whiff of reform in the air, this is a brave and honest message. Andrew Cohen
Review
This is less a public-policy book than a deeper exploration of what it means to punish... So much of Ferguson's project is an attempt to bring readers closer to understanding what it's like to fall into the maw of the justice system--that's why he has no compunction about bringing in literature (Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and other authors) when nonfiction is too dry or imprecise to do the job. When trying to understand the unimaginable torment of sitting alone in a coffin-like cell for years, or of watching helplessly as one's execution date creeps closer and closer, sometimes fictions comes closer to capturing these horrors better than any ACLU report ever could. Inferno is a wide-ranging effort that covers many subjects. A section on Cesare Beccaria, an 18th-century thinker and reformer on justice issues, is fascinating...Ferguson's descriptions of the hell that is solitary confinement (and the arbitrary, capricious manner in which the incarcerated are subjected to it) are powerful...Inferno still stands out as an interesting, intellectually innovative take on a hellish problem. The Atlantic
Review
Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment explores the unusual cruelty and vengefulness in our criminal justice system. Jesse Singal - Boston Globe
Review
The measurements of the American mania for incarceration are both staggering and, apparently, meaningless. With five per cent of the world's population, the U.S. has 25 per cent of its prisoners, 100,000 of them in mind- and soul-destroying solitary...The heart of this superb book is a search for the deeper reasons, for the roots of the American impulse to punish, and punish severely. Ferguson...maintains a tone that is remarkably, not accusatory or political, as he roams through Dante and Melville, Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli looking for clues, for the punished are generally silent (or silenced)...The current, self-defeating situation--where the $80-billion-a-year U.S. prison system does nothing so well as it trains and brutalizes future violent offenders--has been a generation in the making, and will probably take as long to wind down. But that process can't even begin until Americans start talking about why they do what they do. Andrew Sullivan - The Dish
Review
Inferno is a passionate, wide-ranging effort to understand and challenge...our heavy reliance on imprisonment. It is an important book, especially for those (like me) who are inclined towards avoidance and tragic complacency. If Robert A. Ferguson is persuasive on nothing else, he is convincing in his claim that we should look our use of imprisonment full in the face. That means examining the psychological, philosophical, cultural, institutional, and political reasons for locking so many away. This examination can be uncomfortable indeed. Ferguson is relentless in demonstrating how our use of the language of fairness and rationality can obscure vindictiveness and arbitrariness...Ferguson brings this unblinking honesty to other aspects of the punishment system. He insists that we uncover and acknowledge the pleasure people can take in retribution. He shows how the sterile influence of legal positivism has helped to strip legal language of its moral component...His book is too balanced and thoughtful to be disregarded. Brian Bethune - Maclean's
Review
Probing and thought-provoking...The book moves deftly among philosophy, law, and criminology, but its heart and soul is literature...[An] excellent book. Robert F. Nagel - Weekly Standard
Review
Ferguson's descriptions of prisoners' suffering are compelling and thought provoking...A must for those working within the criminal justice system, the law, or religion. Joshua Dubler - Chronicle of Higher Education
Review
andldquo;This engaging book blows the top off the tired old argument over whether humans are selfless do-gooders or relentless self-interest machines. . . . With a series of lively, surprising, and entertaining examples of how we actually behave when the veneer of civilization is gone, this book is a must for anyone who has wondered whether government interferes with our inherently good natures or restrains our inherently bad ones.andrdquo;andmdash;Morris Hoffman, state trial judge, member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, and author of The Punisherandrsquo;s Brainand#160;and#160;and#160;
Review
andldquo;Iandrsquo;ve been a fan of Paul Robinsonandrsquo;s writings on criminal justice for many decades. This book brings his brilliant scholarship to a wider audience in the context of criminal justice issues that affect us all.andrdquo;andmdash;Alan Dershowitz, author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law and professor emeritus of law at Harvard Universityand#160;
Review
andldquo;Paul Robinson, perhaps the nationandrsquo;s leading criminal law scholar, has produced a book that raises profound issues while suggesting practical legal reformsandmdash;and he does so in a remarkably entertaining way.andrdquo;andmdash;Paul G. Cassell, former federal judge and Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utahand#160;
Review
andldquo;Hobbes said a society without punishment would be a jungle. Some modern day academics have suggested it would prove to be a paradise, if we would only give it a chance. Who is right? Both and neither, as Paul and Sarah Robinson show with the help of some extraordinary, insufficiently appreciated andlsquo;natural experiments.andrsquo;. . . Here we learn how justice emerges from nature red in tooth and claw.andrdquo;andmdash;Leo Katz, author of Why the Law Is So Perverse andand#160;Frank Carano Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvaniaand#160;and#160;
Review
andldquo;Fun, fascinating, and full of insight: Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers will make you reconsider what you think you know about government and its relationship to social order.andrdquo;andmdash;Peter T. Leeson, author of Anarchy Unbound and Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason Universityand#160;
Review
The book's descent into the frightening depths of criminal punishment leaves us nearly despondent...Ferguson's major re-envisioning of what incarceration offers us is a chance to turn our present incarcerative hell into a purgative place where hope of redemption can still survive...Ferguson's book opens our eyes in the darkness and points to a possible exit. It should be required reading for judges, legislators, politicians, prison authorities and all of us who are democratically responsible for the inferno that together we have created. Frances O. Sandiford - Library Journal
Synopsis
Robert Ferguson diagnoses all parts of a massive, out-of-control punishment regime. Turning the spotlight on the plight of prisoners, he asks the American people, Do we want our prisons to be this way? Acknowledging the suffering of prisoners and understanding what punishers do when they punish are the first steps toward a better, more just system.
Synopsis
It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groupsand#8212;they all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarahand#160;Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative, within limits.and#160;
What these and#8220;communitiesand#8221; did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should todayand#8217;s criminal justice system build on peopleand#8217;s shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society.
About the Author
Paul H. Robinson isand#160;Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the worldandrsquo;s leading criminal law scholars. A prolific writer and lecturer, he is the lead editor of Criminal Law Conversations and the author of Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert, among other books. Sarah M. Robinson is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and a practiced social worker. She currently works as an author and researcher.