[lbo-talk] Abolition of prisons (Was: Angela...)

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 7 20:28:58 PDT 2009


Doug,

Have you ever had Marxist criminologist William Chambliss on your show? (If he isn't 'Marxist,' he is at least a 'critical criminologist' of the conflict school of Sociology.)

It'd be great if Foucault were still alive to pick his brains on this. But he isn't.

Foucault's _Discipline & Punish_ always seemed to me a descriptive, if not chilling, Weberian evaluation of the function of prisons in the history of Western penology, but it pointed towards no clear solutions, other than perhaps the revolutionary reconstitution of society wherein the root social causes of crime - alienation, commodity fetishism and reification (where lifeless objects seem imbued with vital, seductive attributes - i.e., cars - that make them more attractive than actual living beings), separating humans from their own economic self-determination via class property, and the sociopathological, warmaking, misanthropic policies of the State, etc. - are eradicated.

-B.



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