[lbo-talk] Prisons and the Left

[John Thornton]

Dennis Claxton wrote:
> At 05:11 PM 4/9/2009, Joseph Catron wrote:
>
>> The report names two people who didn't even exhibit antisocial 
>> tendencies
>> off the job,
>
>
> There's plenty of evidence that when a prison comes to town there is 
> widespread negative fallout that includes spikes in domestic violence.
>
> PBS ran a film a couple years ago called Prison Town USA about 
> Susanville, California where a new prison opened in 1995.  The film 
> was made over a period of four years.  Here's something from the 
> synopsis on the PBS website:

Several years ago when my SO and I added the Federal Prison and nearby 
State prison to our list of pet therapy visits I got to see up close how 
sucky the guards are.
We were doing therapy with convicted rapists.
On only our second visit one of the guards made pelvic thrusting motions 
towards my SO and asked he if she liked it rough.
Initially I was furious but that night it dawned on me that this guard 
almost couldn't behave any other way.
His job requires that he dehumanize thousands of people every day.
It requires that he treat people as animals.
How could anyone doing that 5 and 6 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day, 
not eventually carry that same attitude elsewhere?
It seems to me the guard absolutely has to treat inmates this way or 
else be consumed with self-loathing for treating people like animals.
The guards routinely treated the inmates as subhuman and since we were 
there to treat the inmates humanely it was inevitable a good number of 
guards would come to dislike us.

John Thornton