I somewhat disappointed in the lack of imagination on the part of most responders to my proposal for elimination of the prison system. It does bear out, however, the failure of most to grasp what social construction means in material actuality (or at least a failure to incorporate that understanding into their oridnary thinking). The comments in the thread were, consequently, quite banal.... Carrol
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I think you should re-think why the responses were mostly empty.
One of the problems with leftists and intellectuals in general is they don't usually come in contact with the brutal side of the prison industrial complex. Most have probably never been in jail even on a petty charge. Most have never faced a serious prison sentence. Most have never known a real `criminal' well enough to get into their thinking processes and emotional lives.
These are forms of concrete knowledge about the world and how it works. So without this kind concrete knowledge intellectuals can not first of all imagine how a criminal construction of a person works. Then, second how the prison industrial complex, where the courts and laws are HQ central, really does construct (and recruits) its potential and actual inmates.
I am not a soft headed, fizzy minded, free living hippy with his head up his ass and that's why I am for abolishing Penitentiary USA.
The reason I can see and imagine how to get rid of this monster, is because I have tasted some of its products. I've spent short stays in jail. I faced a potential five year term in federal prison. While I eventually got out of that bind, I spent two and a half years with a conviction hanging over my head--a potential fugitive from justice. I had a roomate who was a petty criminal and I forged a birth certificate for him using my art skills for a good cause. As a teenager I stole a car and drove it around LA and then dropped it off, wiping it down. I've worked with social welfare systems, I've been through the Family Law Court parade with a friend in a terrible battle*
Of course I've done illegal drugs, I harbored military deserters. I asked my attorney once, what's the law call a guy like me? He laughed and thought a moment. Scofflaw. You are a scofflaw Chuck. I fell in love with this term. He was right. That's my basic crime. I have also hung around with a lot of lawyers. Most of them were scofflaws, in spirit at least.
The point is these experiences have given me enough concrete knowledge that I have no problem thinking about how to get rid of that institution and all its little allied bullshit schemes.
My reason for the abolish the law, abolish the crime way of looking at the problem comes from the basic idea that when they got rid of the draft, they got rid of one type of crime I committed. So dismantling the laws does a couple of things. It abolishes the crime, and it allows for development of alternatives to prison or confinement. And you don't need a revolution, before you can start working on it.
For the intelligencia here who have had no contact with prison- industrial complex it is impossible to see how those of us who want it torn down can justify our position. Our skeptics may follow the theoretical idea of a psycho-social construct of identity (criminal identity), but they haven't seen it in practice or felt it themselves. Well, use a thought experiment. If you are a parent, then it should be pretty easy to imagine how your child can get into trouble with the cops, teachers, or other kids. In fact most of your methods for dealing with your kids in potentially hostile circumstances are all attempts to prevent a social construct from taking place, i.e the bad boy, bad girl syndrome.
Look, its pretty simple. The way to train a pit bull to fight, is to beat and torture them, make them mad as hell through pain most of the time. Guess what? It works. Duh! You have just socially constructed a killer.
I had to learn how to read pit-bulls around here, because they are a popular pet. It took me a lot of observation and contact with strange pit bulls to guess which ones were actually dangerous and which ones were friendly, normal dogs. Pit-bulls were bred physically for fighting, and to have a propensity for learning to fight. If that propensity isn't developed through training, then they don't fight any more than other dogs.
So, can we connect the dots here?
*I want to say something about family law and the courts. I just watched a close friend of mine go through this especially nasty part of the prison industrial complex. All through this process that is supposed to be a legal reform, I watched his son go from being a mostly normal little boy and turn into a teenage criminal. Now he is doing time. I am expecting that he will come out a better criminal than he went in. He will probably spent the rest of his adulthood becoming a better and better criminal. I don't see anyway out. The underlying pathology was his relationship with his mother and older sister. These primary relationships turned into a torturous control mechanism that kept him in a state of constant shame, anxiety, stress, frustration, and anger. The internal family relationships and their pathological dynamics were mirrored in family law courts, the social psychology system (healhcare), the welfare system, the schools and peer socializing systems. In about a year he will get into the probation and parole wing of the complex.
The probation and parole systems which were also originally conceived as liberal reforms now act to expand the prison industry to cover almost all the other institutional relationship people have to family, job, education, etc. In other words it is through the probation-parol and or family law system that all these other institutions are recruited and turned into methods of punishment, control and confinement.
The above mentioned network of institutions is the concrete meaning behind the term prison industrial complex. Most US left intelligencia has no idea how the bureaucratic regimes of the society can be linked up to form a giant open air prison system. The better lawyers within the probation system certainly do. A disable lawyer and acquaintance detailed it out for me one day. His job was to fashion this network and individualize its use to match the lives of his charges.
Think about some of the tv shows. I especially like Cold Case, where they tract down people using records. In reality, that is the trace of the prison industrial complex and its interlocking systems of control and punishment.
This is another reason why I want to dismantle this whole mess through law. You can break these linkages and stop them from re- forming and expanding in a much more thorough manner through the way you conceive law and society.
CG