>Wojtek, How is killing god knows how many innocent persons (thanks to the
>lack of decent legal aid access afforded the poor) going to do anything to
>solve the problem of racisim in the US? Or that guy's racist attitudes
>and actions...?
Of course it will not. But how does defending these guys, even though those who got a raw deal? This is more of an issue of getting a fair trial - a principle that even respectable conservatives would support, so why should it be central on the agenda of a labor movement?
I think that while many poor defendants would get lighter sentences if they had better defence, cases of innconet people sentenced for crimes they did not commit are extremely rare. US is a very violent society, vicitimization rates (even if limited to violent crimes only) are much higher than incarceration rates - so the ruling class has no need for framing innocent people to feed its prison-industrial complex (as opposed to, say, Stalinist gulags). If anything, many crimes (especially violence against women or petty burglaries) are unsolved and unpunished.
I do not even think that high crime and vicitmization rates are a product of capitalism. Western Europe is no less capitalist than the US, but the EU incareration rate is about 100 per 100,000, while in the US it is about 700 per 100,000. More importantly, western European societies ar emuch less violent than either US or, say, Eastern Europe.
As I see it, crime is a byproduct of social change in many different ways, e.g. geographical mobility reduces informal social control mechanisms exerted by more stable communities, social mobility creates expectations of material wealth, disiintegration of traditional communities produces anomia and culture of poverty (Eastern Europe is a prime example of that) - to name a few, well documented in literature. Similar social problems with crime exist in the US and Eastern Europe despite their vastly different legal, political and economic systems, but sharing one important characteristic - both are societies in flux, undergoing thorough social changes - while most Western European countries are much stable socially, hence lower crime rates.
It seems to me that "crime and punishment" are at best tangential to labor interest - because the causes that produce crime are not directly related to worker-employer relations, and the tretament of criminal offenders by law enforcement does not affect those relations. Moreover, the principles of fair trial and just punishment are so mainstream, that those few inmates who were wrongly convicted, as a result of either error or malice, do not need the Left or labor movement to get help.
wojtek