Anastasia’s book offers stimulating keys to understanding today’s demagogic uses of criminal justice and the dynamics that characterize the crisis in the prison system. A decisive chapter is dedicated to penal populism, should not be referred to a specific justicialist ideological movement that identifies the criminal repression of crimes as its sole purpose. More widespread than is generally thought, it also resonates within the intermediate bodies of democratic regimes themselves. The book gives an account of a complex of actors, motivations and objectives of the possible and actually practised uses of law and criminal justice. The author’s reflections are part of the criminal guarantee movement and participate in an abolitionist sensibility, which is manifested both in the radical questioning of the current model of repression and punishment of crimes, and in the search for alternative solutions to those advocated by neo-liberal penal policies, which feed the same feeling of insecurity that they claim to want to curb.
