>You never have to contend with the facts that SA brought up, like the
>trajectory of crime rates - or the fact that other societies didn't
>have the same crime or incarceration booms as the U.S. Why?
Yeah. Even though Foucault, like Jean Genet, spoke out about George Jackson, I think for the most part when either of them were talking about prison it was less generalized than it was specific to the French system and its history.
Christian Parenti argues that Foucault works only "to some extent" when you're looking at the U.S.
>French philosopher Michel Foucault came up with
>the notion of a "carcereal society," wherein we
>are subject to constant supervision by anonymous
>managers. His thesis is that, with the rise of
>capitalism, industrialization, and the modern
>nation-state, societal control has shifted away
>from spectacular assaults on the body, such as
>public executions, and toward interior methods
>getting subjects to regulate themselves by
>internalizing authority. For Foucault, this
>shift is not evidence of improving human rights
>or moral progress, but rather of increasingly
>effective and pernicious mechanisms of social regulation.
>
>And his thesis is true, to some extent, but what
>we’ve seen in the U.S., with the rise of our
>incipient police state, is in some ways a return
>to the spectacular uses of terror.
http://www.diggers.org/freecitynews/_disc1/00000052.htm