[lbo-talk] Prisons and The Left

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Apr 7 16:39:05 PDT 2009


At 07:15 PM 4/7/2009, Mike Beggs wrote:


>Yet civilisation abides! I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that
>American sentencing is unusually harsh. I guess prison for car theft
>just seems so normal to you that alternatives are unthinkable.


:)

pshaw. Listening to Davis, she mentioned reading a paper her younger brother had written about abolishing the prison system. She thought it interesting that his ideas were so utopian but then she recalls that there was more "in the air" on the topic at the time. Prior to the baby boom that contributed to skyrocketing crime rates (greater # of young males [< 40 iirc], there'd been talk of crazy things like really short sentences. I remember that because, in the late 80s, I took a poli sci class in which that made perfect sense to the author and the prof to present this view. Maybe it still is. I didn't go one to take criminology courses. At any rate, I don't recall that I was taking a class from some radical. It was just one of those articles someone would include in a class where differing views are presented.

But as with everything else, the shift to the right, right, right. the idea that it's more effective to give people sentences of less than 6 months doesn't seem to be considered. The author's argument was that, less than 6 months is enough to convince the jailbird that he should never want to be there again. It had a deterrent effect, iow. After that, though, and the jailbird gets used to it, learns how to navigate the system, finds his or her place in the pecking order, makes new friends, etc.

Relatedly, years ago a friend had to teach a social problems course. She was convinced to use a book recommended by her husband, a soci professor. That book laid out the case for using different forms of shaming that is worth a read: Crime, Shame and Reintegration by John Braithewaite.

http://www.ciaj-icaj.ca/english/publications/DP1999/braithwaite.pdf

(although not Freudian that I recall -- I never read it thoroughly, just skimmed it as my friend was always yammering about the book as she bounced off ideas about how to teach the course and how things were going -- since she and her husband were both Freudians, my hazy memory is that it fits nicely into stuff that Eli Sagan and Larry Hirschhorn have talked about: superego/guilt versus ego ideal/shame)

shag

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws



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