>In those days when the State was pissed at you it let you
>know it.
But the U.S. state has 1.8 million people behind bars. Based on present rates of incarceration, a black male born today faces a 1 in 4 lifetime chance of going to prison - prison, where you go after conviction for serious crimes, not merely jail, where you go while awaiting trial or after conviction for minor offenses. Then it was extraoarindary spectacles of public cruelty. In Foucault's time, "liberal" penal practice had come to emphasize ritualized scrutiny in the name of rehabilitation. In the U.S., we've evolved to ritualized private cruelty on an industrial scale, sustained in public opinion through mediatized bloodlust.
Doug