>>In other words, Foucault & Co. have made popular either an inability or a
>>refusal to make a distinction between prisons & schools, for instance,
>>_just because_ the latter also "police" people's behaviors.
>
>Oh it's not just Foucault - it's lots of kids who experience the
>awfulness of so much American schooling (can't say what it's like
>elsewhere). Places that make you into "just another brick in the
>wall," if you want to be really debased and quote Pink Floyd. Of
>course schools are not prisons, but sometimes they feel that way.
Yes, but still there is a difference. Even the worst schools are better than prisons, and kids are better off in schools than in prisons (and kids know that if you ask them). And our job is to make schools & other social programs better serve the needs of people, and, to do so, we have to stop the war on crime. Nathan posted this:
>REALLY GOOD NEWS!
>With the discussion of the numbers in jail, we may have the good news that
>hordes of 14-year olds may not be added to the numbers. Prop 21, an
>initiative to force many juvenile offenders into adult courts and prisons,
>may be headed for defeat. It's still close and the turnout could be
>critical, but we need to hope. This is a truly odious bill and its defeat,
>combined with the moratorium on Ill. executions and the Diallo trial, we may
>be seeing a turnaround agains the get-tough-at-any-cost approach to crime
>control.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
We have to defeat this sort of initiative. The Foucauldian analysis gets in the way of the fight against the war on crime. The U.S. governing elite has moved away from Benthamite reformism & rehabilitation through the reformation of the soul; what they want now is simple punishment (e.g. treating kids as adults).
Yoshie