Some punishments in our utopian criminal justice system could involve doing onerous, boring work. (I own two books by Albert and Hahnel on Parecon, one illustrated for dummies, one more technical, neither worthwhile) Part of the scandal of the current system is the levels of unemployment worldwide and then so much time and energy is wasted on both sides in the class war.
Here's a book review concerning both the willingly and unwillingly unemployed. Her last paragraph contains a kicker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/books/review/20EHRENRT.html New York Times Book Review Jan. 20, 2002
'Down and Out, On the Road': Hobo Heaven By BARBARA EHRENREICH
The current recession comes on top of a nationwide backlash against the homeless, who, even as their numbers grow to alarming new levels, face diminished forms of public relief and a multitude of laws against panhandling and living on the streets. So it is a pleasure to announce that the homeless, who have so little else, have at least gained, in Kenneth L. Kusmer's excellent ''Down and Out, On the Road,'' a history of their own.
Homelessness predates the Republic, to judge from the colonists' fretful efforts to control the ''rogues, vagabonds, common beggars and other lewd and disorderly persons'' in their midst. But, Kusmer argues, it was the Civil War that gave vagrancy its first big boost. Although the war was expected to inculcate ''the stern, unyielding discipline of the camp,'' its immediate effect was to accustom a generation of men to riding in trains, camping out and foraging for food. The word ''tramp'' originally described a military foraging expedition; a ''bum'' was a soldier who foraged a little too enthusiastically. And of course, the war left many men too damaged -- physically and psychologically -- for normal, settled forms of work.
The expansion of the nation's rail network in the late 19th century made hoboing a marginally viable lifestyle for the intermittently unemployed. In the hobo jungles that grew up along the tracks, a kind of counterculture arose, in which ''you share and share alike in true fraternal style,'' leading some to imagine that America's tramps were not just ''utterly depraved savages,'' as the affluent usually saw them, but members of a secret Communist conspiracy. Displaced African-American men found a relatively nonracist haven in the hobo world; even gays and women tramped. In 1902, the leader of a ''large and dreaded band of marauders and tramps'' in Monroe County, N.Y., was discovered, upon arrest, to be a woman.
While poorer people were likely to help the homeless with a nickel or a meal, the educated middle class tended to view such handouts as the very source of vagrancy. Charity ''reformers'' targeted charity itself, campaigning against the practice of giving to beggars and insisting that all forms of help be tied to work, or at least to psychologically redemptive make-work projects. Even the Salvation Army came under attack, at the beginning of the 20th century, for encouraging pauperism by ''tempting many weak and weary men and women to relinquish the hard struggle to provide for themselves,'' and leaders of the social work profession went so far as to advocate arresting the Army's bell-ringers under anti-begging ordinances.
Some of the late 19th- and early 20th-century tramps were indeed conscientious objectors to the world of work, opting for what one called a ''freedom undreamed of in factories.'' College students rode the boxcars for fun and cheap transportation; the young Sherwood Anderson, James Michener and Louis L'Amour all sampled the tramping life. For middle-class men, hoboing served both as an alluring counterpoint to the tame, middle-class, male, breadwinner ideal and as a warning of the fate that awaited the man who strayed from accepted male behavior.
But Kusmer, who teaches history at Temple University, marshals an impressive amount of evidence to show that most of the homeless did not volunteer for their condition. Economic recessions predictably swelled their ranks, and layoffs and industrial accidents kept up the supply of unemployed and broken men. The postindustrial economy of recent decades has been, if anything, even more reliably productive of the down and out, in boom years as well as bad ones, with the numbers of the homeless rising to about a half a million by the mid-90's. In our deindustrialized and gentrified cities, far fewer of the homeless fit old stereotypes of the bum: about a third are women, half are people of color and many are children.
I would have liked ''Down and Out, on the Road'' to go on for a few more chapters on, say, the current housing crisis, welfare reform and the recent proliferation of low-wage service jobs. But the history Kusmer relates speaks for itself: ours is a society that routinely generates destitution -- and then, perversely, relieves its conscience by vilifying the destitute.
Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book is ''Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.''