>I (we?) don't
>need to answer these "what about Dahmer?",
The serial killer card is a false dilemma akin to the "because the terrorists hate us and they could live next door" rationale used to ratchet up surveillance etc.
In his book The Soft Cage, Christian Parenti writes about how this can play out in current trends like "zero-tolerance parole":
"While one agent watches the parolee's movements on a computer terminal, another keeps tabs from the field. Any infraction of the parolee's schedule of work, official interviews, home inspections, and curfew means a year back in the state pen. 'I'm still a prisoner' laments one of the system's wards. 'I'm a prisoner in my own home.'
When such complaints come from convicted pedophiles one hardly cares, but like so many other criminal justice innovations and 'reforms' intensive parole only begins with 'the worst of the worst' and from there it inevitably expands to include others. In many states home detention and electronic monitoring were introduced as alternatives to incarceration but now operate in *addition* to prison. And as technology improves, becomes cheaper, and accumulates we might see a radical proliferation of these soft forms of incarceration."
----------------------------------------------------
Here are a couple of good quick reads from Parenti:
Lockown America in 22 minutes
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/audiocparenti.html
http://www.diggers.org/freecitynews/_disc1/00000052.htm
[...]
Jensen: How did we get to this state of affairs?
Parenti: Official criminological histories generally begin in the Northeast, with the birth of American penitentiaries, but there is an alternative history that, I think, makes more sense. Yale University instructor Robert Perkinson calls slavery the real birth of American incarceration. He says the measures taken to control the black pop-ulation in the South particularly black males are the true antecedents of modern criminal justice. For example, the antislave militias of the South, called "patrollers," did many of the same things cops do now: traveling assigned "beats," stopping black people, demanding to see their papers, and ransacking their homes looking for contraband, such as "excess" food that might indicate a slave was preparing to take off.
Then, after the Civil War, the "black codes" arose, and Southern criminal justice as we know it was born. By the 1880s and 1890s, Southern criminologists were talking about the "innate criminality" of black people. Those last twenty years of the nineteenth century also saw a huge explosion of incarceration in the South. Black people, rather than being kept as slaves, were being put into prison camps. Traditionally, Southern prisons had been very small. The period after the Civil War brought the first great wave of imprisonment in American criminal justice.
The current prison buildup really begins in the 1960s, because of two crises: an economic crisis and a political crisis.
Jensen: Noam Chomsky labeled the political crisis of the sixties a "crisis of democracy."
Parenti: Exactly: too much democracy. The sixties brought the civil-rights movement, the black-power movement, the poor people’s movement, the antiwar movement, and all sorts of informal rebellion. At first, the police were unable to contain this uprising, which was a big embarrassment for the U.S., because we were waging a bitter ideological struggle with the Soviets to prove that capitalism and liberal democracy were better than socialism. When the entire world saw images of Watts and Detroit going up in flames and angry black people describing in detail how they were being held down by the system, it put the lie to the idea of true democracy and racial progress in the U.S. So the federal government was very concerned about the failure of the police to contain the rebellion.
[...]