Excerpt: “Ferguson’s book is unique in the academic literature on imprisonment in its reliance on imaginative literature to illustrate, indeed to demonstrate, the barbarity as he conceives it to be of our prison system. Hence the book’s title, Inferno: the reader who misses the allusion to Dante will be enlightened by the last chapter, which is about the first two books of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Inferno is a prison for eternal life and the guards literally are devils. Purgatory is civilized, rehabilitative in its aim and methods. “Punishment through pain … works differently in purgatory. It prevents sin, or unlawfulness, from taking place by breaking the habit of it. The goal is correction; pain is the by-product that makes it possible…. The damned struggle alone in hell except when they are fighting or hurting one another [he is forgetting Paolo and Francesca]. Nothing like that ever occurs in purgatory. Instead of screams of pain, we now have welcoming embraces. The setting is noticeably like regular society in its casual conviviality…. The souls in purgatory have sinned through misdirected love, basically selfishness. The antidote, correct love, manifests itself through kindness and mutuality.” And of course the prisoners have hope of eventual release into heaven. The current model for our prisons, Ferguson argues, is hell—he calls the American prison “a secular version of hell.” He would prefer that it were purgatory.” via Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert Ferguson Reviewed | New Republic.
To Talk Like This and Act Like That 