well, if only there were that many youtubes of Angela Davis.
But y'all have to listen to this one, a lecture on the prison as emblem of democracy.
she mentions one historian's study about the proliferation of prisons *after* the revolution. among many other things she says -- I've never read her on prisons -- she notes that there is a double-edginess to the prison and u.s. democracy.
it is, on the one hand, seen by people *at the time* as a system necessary to and emblematic of democracy.
AND the denial of liberaty was the neccessary exception that proved the rule.
She says that the tie between democracy and prisons are so intertwined, so bound up together, that it might not be possible to rethink the system without rethinking democracy as well.
That first bit reminded me of the histories of racism in the u.s. The ideology of racism had been around, but it really ramped up *after* the civil war. The idea that people had to be segregated by race and that there needed to be miscegenation laws only mattered once slaves were freed.
Same dealio with incarceration. You need prisons really badly when people are ostensibly free.
so maybe, the dealio with the u.s. and its incredibly high rate of imprisonment is precisely located there.
durkheim would lurv it. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q25-KJ55k_0&feature=related
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)