"Inmates have been judged to have brought whatever discomfort they suffer on themselves, and there is little desire to measure that discomfort. Hundreds will gather for candlelight services at the location of an execution. Yet few blink an eye over a sentence of life without parole. ...
"By keeping those in prison securely hidden from public view and by making sure that the criminals who perform serious crimes never reappear, society confirms that it does not want to think about whatever suffering takes place behind jailhouse walls even if it knows that humiliation, discomfort, crime, and physical abuse are prevalent there. Confusions in the relation of pain to punishment are masked by an indifference that controls communal attitudes toward the huge population in American prisons."
- Robert. A Ferguson, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."As I've become more interested in the How and Why of human violence and its historical trends, it was perhaps inevitable that I would seek a deeper understanding of crime and its causes and the administration of criminal justice. How the human animal (an evolved creature like any other, subject to and shaped by the pressures of natural selection) seeks to live in a civil society of its own design is about as an important area for critical examination as it gets. Nothing modest here. What constitutes a crime and why? How and why do people come to commit criminal acts in the first place? How and why do we treat criminals in the way we do? These are significant questions that should concern everyone in society.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky [h/t "Con-Air" (1997)]
Connected to the process of justice is how the system and its outcomes are perceived and interpreted by people in general, especially those who have little to no contact with it. One need look no further than the comments section of a news article or blog post about crime and/or the people who commit criminal acts to be confronted with an overarching and disturbing aspect of what Justice means to many people: Punishment.
Some vocal commenters, protected (and perhaps embiggened) by the distance and anonymity provided by the internet forum, are quick to revel in the need for ever harsher punishments for those who perpetrate heinous acts. Even if the idea of proportionality is brought up, that is, how long sentences should be relative to the severity of the crime, precisely what "doing time" entails is apparently seldom fully considered.
It is difficult to grasp intellectually what it truly means to be sent away to prison for a given number of years. Being denied personal freedom is seen as the just punishment for those who abuse said freedom. However, this is only part of the story. Consider the horrors prisoners must endure on a daily basis at the hands of other inmates and some prison "guards". We know the stories about rape and the terror of violent gang regimes and hierarchies. They have so permeated popular culture that they have almost become trivial, even comical. This is both ironic and tragic.
And yet, some people still feel that prisoners "deserve" to be subjected to this kind of hellish environment. They are criminals, they say, why should we care what their lives are like in prison? They should get what's coming to them. An eye for an eye, just deserts, and all that. To me, this is tantamount to sadism. Retribution is a slippery slope that makes us indifferent to or even suspect of the plight of prisoners, which invariably leads to a kind of punishment creep. They are still people after all. Even attempting to discuss the nightmare prison situation is to invite accusations of "siding" with the criminals over the victims. This is a false choice, and a lazy rhetorical tool. It is a serious impediment to peeling back the curtain on the current state of our punishment regime. We don't want to see how the sausage is being made, let alone consider that we may need to change the recipe.
A cursory examination of human nature reveals a tendency to take pleasure in inflicting punishment. This should give us pause. How could it be just for a person who possessed too much of the wrong kind of substance to be sent to a place where they are terrorized by rape, violence, and other shocking forms of abuse? Not to mention that prisons as they currently exists are effectively recidivism factories...
This is why when I stumbled upon Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert A. Ferguson on one of my daily internet wanderings, I knew it would be the book for me. I'm not even two chapters in and it is already evident that this book is dazzling in its scope with respect to legal theory, literature, history, and philosophy. As I read it, I feel as though I'm being let in on a secret. It's like I'm being presented with answers to the questions I only vaguely knew I had. But this is a retrospective conceit. Of course smart people have already been wondering and writing eruditely about these things! And this is exactly the book I've been waiting for.
Obviously, I would recommend this book to anyone involved with or interested in the criminal justice system. But since we all naturally feel as though we have an innate sense of justice and have an impulse to inflict punishment upon those who have done wrong, Inferno should be required reading for everyone. People are tried, sentenced, and punished on all of our behalf, so shouldn't we take an active and critical interest in how and why the system works the way it does?
