Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment. By Robert A. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 337 pp. $29.95 paper.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12174
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Published date: 01 December 2015

involved in these questions, thisbook renews the necessary dialogue

about criminology’s place in public life.

The book is a useful resource for anyone working in social science

disciplines dealing with these issues; however it would also be of inter-

est to anyone curious about our international political landscape and

questions of justice and injustice caused by global transformations.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt (1990) Thinking Sociologically.Oxford: Blackwell.

Nora, Pierre (1989) “Between Memory and History: les lieux de m

emoire,” 26 (Spring)

Representations 7–24.

Vidal, John (2015) Arnold Schwarzenegger: Climate Change is Not Fiction.Availableat:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/21/arnold-schwarzenegger-

climate-change-is-not-science-fiction?CMP5EMCENVEML1631

***

Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment. By Robert A. Ferguson.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 337 pp. $29.95

paper.

Reviewed by Jonathan Simon, School of Law, University of California,

Berkeley

In this learned and emotionally charged book, Robert Ferguson,

Professor of law, literature and criticism at Columbia University,

asks questions usually elided by specialists in criminal law and crimi-

nology. Why are Americans so ready to punish fellow citizens with

prison sentences, sometimes astoundingly long ones? Why do

Americans seem to care so little about what the lives are like of peo-

ple they actually exile to those prisons? Is the combination of mass

incarceration and chronically overcrowded and inhumane prisons

for which the United States is now globally infamous a result of

good intentions gone awry? Or is this precisely our intention in vot-

ing for laws that produce, and approving elected public officials

who preside over, prisons that deny human dignity in the words of

Justice Kennedy’s landmark Brown v. Plata (2011) decision capping

California’s prison population?

The basic figures and facts about mass incarceration in the U.S.

today are well-known, but this book moves into topics and sources

generally ignored. Ferguson takes far more seriously than most crit-

ics of mass incarceration the formal legitimacy of prison as

1032 Book Reviews