Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment

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.

Available in the CJI Library

Chris: why I pick this book

Robert Fergusson’s brilliant look deep into the drivers of and myths surrounding the American Justice System is a sobering look at an addiction to punishment and its consequences in Western society. Inferno forces the reader to come face to face with the illusion of proportionality in sentencing and how the disconnect between the enforcement (police), disposition (courts) and carceral  (prison) divisions of the system perpetuate a cycle of stigma, violence and dysfunction.  Fergusson forces us to look at those punished and those doing the punishing in a way that will forever challenge one’s deference our criminal justice system.