[lbo-talk] Christian Parenti responds

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Apr 7 18:35:14 PDT 2009


At 08:48 PM 4/7/2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>I forwarded Carrol Cox's manifesto about "Prisons and The Left" - the
>one that accused many of us of being brainless hacks - to Christian
>Parenti. His response was this link:
>
><http://www.thebrunomovie.com/bruno-movie-trailer/>.
>
>Doug

i couldn't view that -- bad connex or something -- but it'd be nice to have an explanation of what he meant by it. i'm sure he's busy, but i would be interested in his response to CC's specific demands which I was too busy to read until CP responded with an opaque gesture. So I read what CC wrote and his demands seemed reasonable, and certainly not worthy of a derisive sniff. (That bit that Dennis forwarded, Pryor's skit on the crazy mofos in jail made me laugh, but also made me think, "well, dude, they are crazy and in need of treatment for being crazy while they're being kept off the streets so as not to harm others. At least, that's the way Pryor made it sound.)

Anyway, CC's demands were:

1. End to the War on Drugs -- by which I assume he means the usual stuff.

2. Decrminalization of 'petty crime' such as shoplifting. decrim, as we know, isn't lacking 'punishment' and so isn't the same thing as legalization.

3. "For the irreducible minimum of those who must be confined, places of confinement must be above all pleasant for their inmates, deprivation of freedom of movement being more than sufficient "punishment." It is the size of penal institutions and their use as institutions of toruture that makes confinement difficult and requires the absurd lengths to which prison security is carried. Civilized places of confinement (resorts as it were) with smaller populations would make security relatively simple and cheap."

4. "Already some methods of control without incarceration are in practice, but are used far too little and accompanied by far too many featuares which serve only to make the person's life as difficult as possible while not adding in the least to the effectiveness of control."

(I assume things like drunk drivers who have to blow into a device to show they aren't loaded before they can get behind a wheel.)

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



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