U.S. human rights violations

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Charles,
Thanks for forwarding this to us. I have not  read Otto Kirscheimer and
Georg Rusche's Punishment and Social Structure, only the summary in David
Garland's award winning book. Yet I don't think it comes as a surprise to
anyone that the best way to ensure a life of incarceration for a youth is
to lock him or her up young, break down the youth's character among adult
prisoners and force him to wear a badge of dishonor in the labor market
ever thereafter. This must be obvious to those in the judicial system as
well; it seems that no one fears any labor shortages that may result from
tracking ever greater number of "questionable" future proletarians into a
life of prison. How has capital overcome its labor shortage? Acquisition of
foreign labor both through immigration and capital export? Interesting
story in the WSJ yesterday about the use of border Mexican, albeit
perfectly bilingual, labor by US corps for data processing. Automation in
the form detailed by David Schwartzman, Black Unemployment--Part of
Unskilled Unemployment? Or has capital overcome a potential labor shortage
through its own slow down in the rate of accumulation? Which means relative
misery here and run away absolute pauperization in the periphery in the
form of collapsing commodity prices and the like, leading to that other
horrific dynamic: Citzenship and Exclusion, the title of an ed. book by
Veit Bader.

 And what about Judith Stein's new book on the history of
deindustrialization, race and liberalism in your own Detroit? How does it
compare with Thomas Sugrue's book (a good short version of his work is in
Michael Katz's ed book on The Underclass Debate).
comradely, rakesh