How Did It Come To This?: "Inferno" by Robert A. Ferguson

"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."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky [h/t "Con-Air" (1997)]

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.

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?

Who Is The Most Dangerous Animal Of All?

Well, I'm (almost) convinced.

The evidence presented in The Most Dangerous Animal Of All by Gary L. Stewart Mustafa is fairly compelling. Admittedly, I'm not an expert in all things Zodiac but I do have a little more than a passing interest in the case. I've read both of Robert Graysmith's books about the Zodiac killer, which made a rigorous and persuasive case for Arthur Leigh Allen. The David Fincher film based on the books is one of my favourite movies.

Despite all the circumstantial evidence that points to Arthur Leigh Allen, his handwriting samples never matched the Zodiac letters. More crucially, when a DNA comparison was made between Allen and a sample from the stamp of a Zodiac letter, they did not match. This leads to speculation as to whether the Zodiac even licked his own stamps, or that perhaps he wasn't acting alone in the killings. Rationalizations aside, the best evidence here points to excluding Allen as a suspect.

Of course, there have been many suspects over the years. Yet the case remains unsolved.

Until now!?

Harper Collins did a great job of keeping this book under wraps. Given the sensitive and extraordinary nature of the claims, this cautious approach was understandable. I'm surprised they were actually able to keep it secret. The cynic in me is also aware that the allure of the big reveal and making a big surprise splash in the press is a great way to move paper.

When I first saw the cover design online, I was immediately struck by the resemblance between the mugshot photo and the police sketch of the Zodiac. I was working from memory alone, as the book cover wasn't juxtaposed against the sketch in the particular article I was reading. From a purely aesthetic perspective, I liked how the hard cover edition of the book had a translucent red dust jacket with the mugshot of Earl Van Best Jr. visible underneath the titles and credits. Nice touch. (Like a handwriting comparison?)

In one of the photo sections of the book, the police sketch is overlayed on top of the photo of Van. It's one thing to do a quick side by side comparison by eye, but these two images line up very closely. But this is by no means conclusive, obviously. After all, didn't every square look like this in the 60s?

Though I won't list them here, there are many interesting aspects of Van's life story that fit in with what we 'know' about the Zodiac. As for the key evidence presented in the book, here are the main points worth mentioning:

• Van's fingerprints show a scar that matches the bloody prints left behind at the Paul Stine murder scene
• The name Earl Van Best Jr. can be found in the ciphers that Zodiac claimed that, if solved, would reveal his identity
• Based on samples of Van's handwriting from his marriage certificates, it is "virtually certain" that he is the same person who wrote the Zodiac letters

A longer list can be found here, but for me, the last point is the most important one. You don't have to be an expert to notice the similarities between Van's handwriting and the Zodiac's. But when you have a forensic analyst that is willing to stake their reputation on being "virtually certain" that Earl Van Best Jr. wrote the Zodiac letters, then you've really got something.

But what about the DNA? Not that it was particularly difficult, but I avoided stumbling across any spoilers about The Most Dangerous Animal Of All. I knew about the partial DNA profile in the Zodiac case, and I knew this would be a crucial point of evidence in legitimizing Gary Stewart's claims. But as I was nearing the end of the book, it became clear that a DNA comparison would not be a part of this narrative. 

Stewart had submitted his DNA to the SFPD, but his profile has yet to be compared to the Zodiac sample from the stamp. The author speculates that since his biological mother later went on to marry a homicide detective who was once involved in the Zodiac case, the police may be sitting on the test in order to avoid possible embarrassment. There are some strange coincidences going on here, and it's a real shame that a full DNA analysis wasn't done before this book was published.

In the end, there's a lot to go on, and it is important to remain a little skeptical. The DNA thing is kind of tough to get past. But this may be worked out in the near future, and hopefully this book gets the ball rolling on that. The Zodiac has been silent for 40 years, so I'm willing to wait a little longer for the conclusion to this story.

... "I need to know who he is."

Currently Reading: "Columbine"

"The media version [of Columbine] was a gross caricature of how [the students] saw it, and of what they thought they had described.

"It made it difficult for social scientists or journalists to come to Littleton later, to study the community in-depth and see what was really going on. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle had played out in full force: by observing an entity, you alter it. ... Heisenberg was a quantum physicist, observing electron behavior. But social scientists began applying his principle to humans. It was remarkable how similarly we behaved. During the third week of April, Littleton was observed beyond all recognition."

From "Columbine" by Dave Cullen 

While this book somehow manages to be meticulous in its detail while remaining engaging and accessible, I am hesitant to consume large portions of it in single sessions. This is because one is required to take frequent breaks in order to digest what one has just read. The topic is obviously horrific, and yet it is as relevant as ever. The writing is disarming. I have yet to decide if this is good or bad.

I have little memory of how the events unfolded in the media as they happened. My understanding of the shooting took shape later with the Michael Moore documentary Bowling For Columbine. I don't recall when I first watched it but the documentary wasn't released until 2002, a little over three years after the tragedy. Moore dealt mainly with the culture surrounding guns in America and how ubiquitous and easy to acquire they are. But the doc also touched on how the shooters were represented by the media and how people tried to rationalize the horror we had just collectively witnessed.

Which brings me to the quote from the book. In the race to find answers (which presumes answers exist in the first place), the media inevitably taints their own reporting by repeating unverified reports and relying on "eyewitness accounts" of the tragedy. Unfortunately in this case, as Cullen aptly points out, "witness" is conflated with "student". Not every student saw what happened, and yet their stories are both sought after and widely reported with little consideration for how this may affect the stories we are all constantly writing and revising in our own minds. This creates a kind of feedback loop of obfuscation where "more information" actually brings us further away from the truth. Thus, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Memories are notoriously unreliable and prone to confabulation, yet we all place an undue amount of trust in our ability to accurately recollect the past. The brain rushes in to fill the gaps and reduce dissonance. There may be no intent to deceive, but an inherently faulty memory can do real damage in situations like these. Things get jumbled up in the chaos, and responders have to make decisions in real time based on unreliable information. Investigators then in turn have to deal with rumours masquerading as truth, which impairs their ability to ultimately find it.

Then there is everyone else who is struggling to make sense of it all. They latch on to misrepresentations, conjecture, and any other tidbit of  information (reliable or otherwise) which will allow them to speculate in any number of ways. This is where confirmation bias creeps in, where we seek to reaffirm our preconceived ideas about video games, androgenous rock stars, Goths, gun culture, etc. Whatever fits. Stories are built up and people become entrenched. Narratives become nearly impervious to truth, and real work must be done to change the minds that have already been made up.

I'm just starting Part Three of the book, "The Downward Spiral" which details the individual characters responsible for the attack. Further down the rabbit hole I go...