You're assuming again that behavior that is socially unacceptable -- to pick something noncontroversial, let's choose kidnap, torture, murder, and dismemberment (which happened to the daughter of one of my professors when I was an undergrad), or serial killing or serial rape -- is in each and every instance the result of macro social causes, as opposed to micro ones, like childhood experieences related to one's upbringing, or causes that are not social at all, like unusual brain chemistry.
--- On Mon, 4/6/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>