🚀 go-pugleaf

Steven Kaasgaard (dc957@torfree.net) wrote:
: Follow-up to: ont.general,tor.general,qc.politique
: References: <6ond03$97j$1@newsource.ihug.co.nz> 
: <35af4d05.247569052@news.sk.sympatico.ca> Organization: Toronto Free-Net
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: XXX (think.uninc@dlcwest.com) wrote:
: : On 17 Jul 1998 11:36:35 GMT, janice <janice@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

: : >
: : > 
: : >                  From Welfare State to Prison State
: : >                     Imprisoning the American Poor
: : > 
: : >                          By Loic Wacquant *
: : > 
: : >                         Le Monde diplomatique
: : >                               July 1998
: : >                     (Translated by Julie Stoker )
: : > 
: : >      Prisons in the "free world" are full to bursting point,
: : >      and fullest of all are US jails. Over the past twenty
: : >      years, exacerbated by ever increasing inequalities,
: : >      preoccupation with the virtues of law and order has led to
: : >      a toughening of penalties. Worst hit have been those
: : >      excluded from the "American dream". The US is constantly
: : >      tightening its social welfare budget, but its generosity
: : >      knows no bounds when it comes to controlling and
: : >      incarcerating those whom it has deigned neither to educate
: : >      and care for, nor provide with housing and an adequate
: : >      diet. "Realism" and "combating insecurity" are the reasons
: : >      cited by those who now call for "an eye for an eye" in an
: : >      attempt to justify criminalising the poor. This US model
: : >      is now taking hold internationally, and in some countries
: : >      in Europe it even seems to be attracting a number of
: : >      leaders on the left - despite the fact that prison is not
: : >      the only method of punishment.
: : >
: : Sadly, this has become true of Canada as well, where in Saskatchewan
: : the Blue Democrats... our derogatory term for the NDP, a once
: : socail-democratic party... have taken to chanting the law and order
: : mantra... along with the capitalist press, and state-funded feminazi
: : organizations.

: : >       Just as in those heady post-war days, Europe's political
: : >      elites, bosses and opinion-formers are looking to the
: : >      United States with fascination and envy, largely because
: : >      of the performance of the US economy. Allegedly, the key
: : >      to US prosperity and the supposed solution to mass
: : >      unemployment is simple: less intervention by the state. It
: : >      is true that the United States - and in its wake, the
: : >      United Kingdom and New Zealand - has slashed social
: : >      welfare spending and pared down the rules on hiring and -
: : >      above all - firing so as to establish "flexible" working
: : >      as the norm in relation to employment and indeed
: : >      citizenship. It is easy for advocates of neoliberal
: : >      policies that involve stifling the welfare state to claim
: : >      that introducing "flexibility" has stimulated an increase
: : >      in wealth and job creation, but they are more reticent
: : >      about discussing the consequences of wage dumping: in this
: : >      instance widespread social and physical insecurity and a
: : >      spiralling in inequality leading to segregation, crime and
: : >      the decay of public institutions.

: : Even people of good will in government become guilty out of their
: : ignorance, because the mainstream [capitalist] media which they rely
: : on for their information sources, has no interest or desire in
: : reporting upon such issues.
: :  
: : >      But it is not enough to measure the direct social and
: : >      human costs of the system of social insecurity that the US
: : >      is proffering as a model to the rest of the world (1).
: : >      There is also its sociological counterpart: a boom in the
: : >      institutions that compensate for the failures of social
: : >      protection (the safety net) by casting over the lower
: : >      strata of society a police and criminal dragnet that gets
: : >      harder and harder to escape. As the social state is
: : >      deliberately allowed to wither, the police state
: : >      flourishes: the direct and inevitable effect of
: : >      impoverishing and weakening social protection.

: : Exactly. Canada now incarcerates more people per capita than ever
: : before in its history... and sentences are at highwater marks for most
: : offences.

: : In the guise of providing necessary protection for women - a product
: : of feminazi and media-induced herscaria - it has even enacted an
: : anti-harassment law that makes the intention of the "perpetrator"
: : irrelevant to guilt. 

: : >      The increase in the prison population, control of
: : >      increasing numbers of people on the margins of the prison
: : >      system, the spectacular boom in the penal sector at both
: : >      federal and state level and the continuing rise in the
: : >      number of black prisoners are the four significant factors
: : >      defining penal trends in the United States since the
: : >      complete change in social and racial attitudes that began
: : >      in the 1970s. That change was triggered by the democratic
: : >      progress secured as a result of Black protest and the
: : >      popular protest movements that surged in its wake
: : >      (students, women, opponents of the Vietnam war and
: : >      environmentalists) (2).

: : It is indeed time to fight back. Sadly, I don't regard women's
: : organizations as much of an alley in any potential battle anymore -
: : since they have been so coopted by feminazi types whose main goal is
: : to expand the repressive apparatus of the state. (he who pays the
: : piper calls the tune) 
: : >      Prisoner numbers have risen dramatically at all three
: : >      tiers of the prison system: in the town and county jails,
: : >      in the central penitentiaries of the fifty states and in
: : >      the federal penitentiaries. During the 1960s the US prison
: : >      population was shrinking, so much so that by 1975 it had
: : >      fallen to 380,000, having declined slowly but consistently
: : >      (by about 1% a year over a ten year period). The talk at
: : >      the time was of emptying the prisons, of alternatives to
: : >      imprisonment and of reserving jail sentences for criminals
: : >      who posed a serious threat (between 10% and 15% of the
: : >      prison population); there were even those who ventured to
: : >      predict that there would soon be no prisons at all (3).
: : >      But that trend was rapidly and dramatically to be
: : >      reversed: ten years later the prison population had soared
: : >      to 740,000 and, by 1995, it was in excess of 1.6 million.
: : >      During the 1990s, prisoner numbers have been increasing by
: : >      8% annually.
: : Police state - 1. Democracy - 0.

: : >      A tripling of the prison population in fifteen years is
: : >      unprecedented in a democratic society. It leaves the
: : >      United States far outstripping the other developed
: : >      countries since its rate of imprisonment - 645 detainees
: : >      per 100,000 of the population in 1997, that is five times
: : >      the 1973 level - is between six to ten times higher than
: : >      that of the countries of the European Union (see table 1)
: : >      (4). Not even South Africa in the days of the apartheid
: : >      regime was throwing as many of its citizens into jail as
: : >      does the US currently.

: : Men are just that much worse behaved now than they were in the 60's.
: : ;-( 
: : >                           Justice "by race"
: : >           Number of prisoners per 100 000 adults (table 1)
: : >                            1985           1990          1995
: : >       Blacks               3544           5 365         6 926
: : >       Whites               528            718           919
: : >       Disparity            3 016          4 647         6 007
: : >       Ratio                6.7            7.4           7.5
: : >      Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional
: : >      Populations in the United States, 1995, Government
: : >      Printing Office, Washington, 1997.
: : > 
: : >       5.4 million US citizens somewhere in the prison system
: : > 
: : >       In California, not so long ago the national champion of
: : >      education and public health but now a believer in prison
: : >      across-the-board, the number of prisoners held in its
: : >      state jails alone rose from 17,300 in 1975 to 48,300 in
: : >      1985 and, by 1995, had passed the 130,000 mark.

: : It  is indeed time we spelled California with a K. Someday those
: : responsible for the fascification of this state should be made to pay.

: : > If we add
: : >      to that the number of prisoners held in the county jails
: : >      (Los Angeles alone holds 20,000 prisoners), the total is a
: : >      staggering 200,000, equivalent to the population of a
: : >      large French provincial town.
: :  
: : >      But the extraordinary expansion of the US penal empire
: : >      extends beyond the great "lock-up" as the century draws to
: : >      a close. There are also those individuals placed on
: : >      probation or parole. It has not been possible to expand
: : >      prison capacity fast enough to absorb the growing stream
: : >      of convicts, with the result that the numbers kept on the
: : >      margins of the prison system have increased even more
: : >      quickly than the number held inside. 

: : George Orwell felt that the great hope for the democratization of the
: : "western world" lay in that group that Marx rather causically
: : dismissed as the lumpenproletariate, since the system excludes them to
: : such an extent that they can never become coopted.

: : Assuming that Marx was correct with his observations of  dialectic
: : processes creating historical outcomes, there should indeed  come a
: : time when the lumpenproletariate achieves self-consciousness, fights
: : back, and fulfills Orwell's objective.

: : >In 1995, 3.1 million
: : >      people were on parole and 700,000 on probation, a total of
: : >      nearly 4 million, representing more or less a fourfold
: : >      increase over 16 years. 

: : And the fascist Rubes (Republicans), feminazis and members of the
: : Canadian Reform party want these numbers increased because the systems
: : "are too soft on criminals."


: : >Consequently, in 1995, there were
: : >      5.4 million Americans in prison or within the prison
: : >      system, accounting for 5% of men aged 18 and over and one
: : >      in five black males (and the reason for that will become
: : >      clear below).
: : The overwhelming majority... as in Canada... also among the poorest of
: : the poor.
: :  
: : >      What is more, in addition to intermediate penalties
: : >      available to it, such as house arrest or confinement in a
: : >      boot camp (disciplinary detention centre), intensive
: : >      probation and telephonic or electronic surveillance (using
: : >      bracelets or other technical gadgetry), the penal system
: : >      has been able to spread its tentacles considerably further
: : >      as a result of the increase in the number of data banks
: : >      that have provided many new ways and centres of distance
: : >      monitoring. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Law
: : >      Enforcement Administration Agency (the federal body
: : >      responsible for crime prevention) encouraged the police,
: : >      courts and prison authorities to set up centralised and
: : >      computerised data banks, and they have since proliferated.

: : 1984 was about the "west" afterall. Orwell is starting to look dam
: : prophetic. :-(

: : >      The new synergy between the penal system's "capture" and
: : >      "observation" functions (5) means that there are now more
: : >      than 250 million "rap sheets" (as against 35 million ten
: : >      years ago) covering some 30 million individuals: close on
: : >      one third of all adult males! The data banks can be
: : >      accessed not only by the FBI and the INS (responsible for
: : >      policing foreigners) and the social services, but also by
: : >      individuals and private bodies. Employers commonly use
: : >      data banks to sift out ex-prisoners trying to find work.
: : >      And so what if the data is frequently incorrect,
: : >      out-of-date, trivial or indeed illegal? The fact that it
: : >      is available leaves not only criminals and crime suspects,
: : >      but also their families, friends, neighbours and
: : >      neighbourhoods, targets of the police and prison system
: : >      (6).

: : >      The lust for prisons is both dependent on and triggers a
: : >      spectacular expansion in the penal sector at federal and
: : >      local level. All the more remarkable because it comes at a
: : >      time when the public sector is having to tighten its belt.
: : >      Between 1979 and 1990, the states increased their spending
: : >      on prisons by 325% on operational costs and 612% on
: : >      buildings - that is to say three times more rapidly than
: : >      national military spending, even though the latter enjoyed
: : >      a privileged position under the Reagan and Bush
: : >      administrations.
: :  
: : >      Since 1992, four states have allocated more than a billion
: : >      dollars to prison spending: California ($3.2 billion), New
: : >      York State ($2.1 billion), Texas ($1.3 billion) and
: : >      Florida ($1.1 billion). All in all, in 1993, the United
: : >      States spent 50% more on its prisons than on the judiciary
: : >      ($32 billion as compared with $21 billion), whereas ten
: : >      years earlier, budget levels were the same for both (in
: : >      the region of $7 billion).
: :  
: : >      The policy of prison expansion is not, however, a
: : >      Republican prerogative. Over the past five years,
: : >      President Bill Clinton has been declaring just how proud
: : >      he is to have put an end to "big government" and the
: : >      commission for reform of the federal state, chaired by his
: : >      would-be successor, Vice-President Al Gore, has been busy
: : >      pruning public sector programmes and jobs. Meanwhile, 213
: : >      new prisons have been built - a figure that does not
: : >      include the private institutions that have proliferated as
: : >      a lucrative market in the sector has been opened up (see
: : >      "A boom in private penitentiaries"). At the same time, the
: : >      number of employees in federal and state penitentiaries
: : >      alone has risen from 264,000 to 347,000. Consequently,
: : >      according to the office of census, the training and hiring
: : >      of prison officials is the area of government activity
: : >      that has seen the most rapid growth over the past decade.
: : > 
: : >      The money has to come from somewhere, and when there is a
: : >      fiscal squeeze, the only way of increasing spending on
: : >      prisons and prison staff is to cut the resources allocated
: : >      to social welfare, health and education. De facto, the
: : >      United States has opted to construct detention centres and
: : >      prisons for its poor, rather than clinics, day nurseries
: : >      and schools (7). Since 1994, for instance, the annual
: : >      budget of the California Department of Correction
: : >      (responsible for state detention centres in which
: : >      prisoners serving more than a year are held) has been
: : >      higher than that allocated to the University of
: : >      California. The budget that Governor Pete Wilson proposed
: : >      in 1995 was actually designed to get rid of a thousand
: : >      jobs in higher education in order to fund jobs for 3,000
: : >      prison warders. That is a decision that weighs heavily on
: : >      the public purse because in California a "screw" earns 30%
: : >      more than a lecturer because of the political influence
: : >      wielded by the prisoner officers' trade union.
: : > 
: : >      Along with this boom in the prison sector has come
: : >      "lateral" expansion of the penal system and thus a huge
: : >      increase in its capacity to hold and neutralise. But the
: : >      main "beneficiaries" of this additional capacity are poor
: : >      families and districts, and particularly black enclaves in
: : >      the cities. That much is clear from the fourth major trend
: : >      in the US prison system: a continuing rise in the numbers
: : >      of Black prisoners, so much so that since 1989 and for the
: : >      first time in history, Black Americans make up the bulk of
: : >      prisoners, even though they account for barely 12% of the
: : >      total US population.
: : > 
: : >      Discriminatory police practices
: : > 
: : >       In 1995, of 22 million black adults, 767,000 were held in
: : >      prison, 990,000 were on probation and 325,000 others on
: : >      parole - a total of 9.4% caught somewhere in the grip of
: : >      the prison system. As far as Whites are concerned, an
: : >      estimate that is on the high side puts the figure at 1.9%
: : >      for a population of 163 million adults (8). In terms of
: : >      prisoner numbers alone, the disparity between the two
: : >      population groups is 1:7.5, and it has been steadily
: : >      worsening over the past ten years: 528 compared with 3,544
: : >      for every 100,000 adults in 1985, and 919 compared with
: : >      6,926 ten years later (see table 2). Over a lifetime, a
: : >      Black male has a one-in-three chance of spending at least
: : >      a year in prison and an Hispanic a one-in-six chance,
: : >      whereas a White has just a one-in-twenty-three chance.
: : >> 
: : >>      This phenomenon - that criminologists tactfully refer to
: : >>      as "racial disproportionality" - is even more marked among
: : >>      young people, prime targets of the criminalisation of
: : >>      poverty. More than a third of Blacks aged between 20 and
: : >>      29 years are either in prison, under the authority of a
: : >>      judge responsible for the execution of sentences, or
: : >>      awaiting trial. In the big cities, the figure is
: : >>      substantially higher than 50%, and in some places, in the
: : >>      heart of the ghetto, in excess of 80%. So much so that, to
: : >>      take an expression borrowed from the tragic memory of the
: : >>      Vietnam War, the operation of the US justice system could
: : >>      be described as a "search and destroy" mission targeted on
: : >>      young Blacks (9).
: : >>                        Europe "lagging behind"
: : >>       Rates of imprisonment in the United States and Europe in
: : >>                            1993 (table 2)
: : >>            (number of prisoners per 100,000 of population)
: : >>       United States                                       546
: : >>       Georgia                                             730
: : >>       Texas                                               700
: : >>       California                                          607
: : >>       Florida                                             636
: : >>       Michigan                                            550
: : >>       New York                                            519
: : >>       Italy                                               89
: : >>       United Kingdom                                      86
: : >>       France                                              84
: : >>       Germany                                             80
: : >>       Holland                                             51
: : >>      Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional
: : >>      Populations in the United States, Washington 1996, and
: : >>      Council of Europe, Penological Information Bulletin No
: : >>      19-20, December 1995.
: : >> 
: : >>      A predisposition to crime only partly explains the huge
: : >>      disparity between Whites and Blacks in the prison
: : >>      population. Mainly, it reflects the fundamentally
: : >>      discriminatory nature of police, court and prison
: : >>      practice. The proof is that Blacks account for 13% of drug
: : >>      users (more or less equivalent to the proportion of Blacks
: : >>      in the population) but a third of those arrested and
: : >>      three-quarters of those imprisoned for drug offences. The
: : >>      policy of a "war on drugs", along with abandonment of the
: : >>      goal of rehabilitation and an increase in ultra-repressive
: : >>      penalties (the widespread application of a system of
: : >>      irreducible fixed penalties, automatic life imprisonment
: : >>      for a third offence and more severe penalties for public
: : >>      order offences), is one of the main causes of the rise in
: : >>      the prison population (10).
: : >> 
: : >>      In 1995 six out of ten of those newly convicted were put
: : >>      in jail for possessing or dealing in drugs. Imprisonment
: : >>      is one area in which Blacks benefit from "positive
: : >>      discrimination", in itself an irony at a time when the
: : >>      United States is turning its back on the affirmative
: : >>      action programmes that were designed to reduce the most
: : >>      glaring racial inequalities in access to education and
: : >>      jobs.
: : >> 
: : >>      But what matters more than all the statistics is the
: : >>      rationale underlying the shift from social welfare to a
: : >>      toughening in penal policy. Far from being inconsistent
: : >>      with the neoliberal programme of deregulation and decline
: : >>      of the public sector, the rise in prominence of the US
: : >>      penal system reveals the true picture, reflecting a policy
: : >>      of criminalising poverty which inevitably goes
: : >>      hand-in-hand with the imposition of insecure and underpaid
: : >>      jobs, as well as the restructuring of social welfare
: : >>      programmes to make them more restrictive and punitive.
: : >>      When imprisonment was institutionalised in America in the
: : >>      mid-19th century, it was primarily conceived as a method
: : >>      of controlling deviant and dependent population groups,
: : >>      and the majority of those imprisoned were the poor and
: : >>      immigrant workers newly arrived in the New World (11).
: : >> 
: : >>      Nowadays, the US prison system performs a similar role in
: : >>      regard to those groups who have been rendered superfluous
: : >>      or who no longer fit in as a result of the restructuring
: : >>      of both employment relations and public welfare: the
: : >>      shrinking working class and the Blacks. As a result, it
: : >>      has become a vital instrument of government by poverty,
: : >>      used to underpin the principle of flexible working at the
: : >>      point where the market in unskilled labour, the urban
: : >>      ghetto and the "reformed" social services meet.
: : >> 
: : >>      Unemployment under wraps
: : >> 
: : >>       To begin with, the prison system makes a direct
: : >>      contribution to regulating the lower segments of the
: : >>      labour market - and does so in infinitely more coercive
: : >>      fashion than any social charge or administrative rule. Its
: : >>      effect here is artificially to compress unemployment
: : >>      levels both by forcibly abstracting millions of males from
: : >>      the job-seeking population, and also by boosting
: : >>      employment in the prison goods and service sector. It is,
: : >>      for example, estimated that during the 1990s US prisons
: : >>      brought down US unemployment figures by two percentage
: : >>      points. According to Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett,
: : >>      taking into account the differences in levels of
: : >>      imprisonment in the two continents, and contrary to the
: : >>      idea commonly accepted and actively disseminated by the
: : >>      advocates of neoliberalism, for 18 of the past 20 years US
: : >>      unemployment rates have been higher than those of the
: : >>      European Union (12).
: : >> 
: : >>      However, Western and Beckett show that the jump in the
: : >>      prison population is a two-edged weapon: while in the
: : >>      short term it makes the employment picture look rosier by
: : >>      cutting labour supply, in the longer term it will
: : >>      inevitably worsen the employment situation by making
: : >>      millions of people more or less unemployable. Although
: : >>      imprisonment has cut US unemployment levels, the prison
: : >>      system will have constantly to be abandoned to keep those
: : >>      levels down.
: : >> 
: : >>      The fact that Blacks are massively and increasingly
: : >>      over-represented at all levels of the prison system
: : >>      highlights its second function in this new form of
: : >>      government by poverty: it is to replace the ghetto as a
: : >>      means of containing population groups considered deviant
: : >>      and dangerous, not to mention superfluous from both an
: : >>      economic and a political point of view - Mexican and Asian
: : >>      immigrants are far more docile. Poor Blacks hardly ever
: : >>      bother to vote and the country's electoral centre of
: : >>      gravity has in any event shifted towards the White
: : >>      suburbs. To that extent, prison is merely the ultimate
: : >>      manifestation of a policy of exclusion of which the ghetto
: : >>      has been a means and an end since it first appeared in
: : >>      history.
: : >> 
: : >>      The penal institutions are now directly tuned into the
: : >>      bodies and programmes responsible for "assisting" marginal
: : >>      groups. While the ethos of punishment inherent in the
: : >>      penal system tends to contaminate and then redefine the
: : >>      aims and machinery of social welfare, prisons have, like
: : >>      it or not, to deal urgently - and with the resources
: : >>      available to them - with the social and medical ills that
: : >>      their "clientele" has been unable to remedy elsewhere.
: : >>      Finally, the effect of budgetary constraints and the
: : >>      political philosophy of decreasing state intervention has
: : >>      been to open up both social assistance and prisons to the
: : >>      market. Many states, like Texas and Tennessee, are already
: : >>      keeping substantial numbers of prisoners in private jails
: : >>      and subcontracting to specialist companies responsibility
: : >>      for administrative follow-up of recipients of welfare
: : >>      benefits. One way of earning a buck from the poor and
: : >>      criminals, both ideologically and economically.
: : >> 
: : >>      What then we are witnessing is the establishment of a
: : >>      commercial socio-penal complex designed to monitor and
: : >>      penalise those population groups that refuse to submit to
: : >>      the new economic order (13) with a gender-based division
: : >>      of labour: the penal element covers males in the main,
: : >>      while the welfare component supervises the women and
: : >>      children. And the same people shuffle around within this
: : >>      more or less closed circle.
: : >> 
: : >>      The American experience shows that today, just as at the
: : >>      end of the last century, rigidly separating social policy
: : >>      and penal policy - or, to take it one further, the labour
: : >>      market, social welfare (if you can still call it that) and
: : >>      prison - means that we are left understanding neither
: : >>      (14). Wherever it becomes a reality, the neoliberal utopia
: : >>      brings with it, for the poorest in society and also for
: : >>      all who find themselves excluded from what remains of
: : >>      protected employment, not more, but less freedom, or
: : >>      indeed no freedom at all. It does this by taking us back
: : >>      to the repressive paternalism of another age when
: : >>      capitalism was rampant, now bolstered by an omniscient and
: : >>      omnipotent punitive state.
: : >> 
: : >>      * Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley
: : >> 
: : >>      (1) See articles on "Eternel retour du 'miracle'
: : >>      am�ricaine", Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1997, and Lo�c
: : >>      Wacquant, "La g�n�ralisation de l'ins�curit� sociale en
: : >>      Am�rique", Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,
: : >>      December 1996.
: : >>      (2) David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight:
: : >>      The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s, Temple
: : >>      University Press, Philadephia, 1991, and James T.
: : >>      Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States
: : >>      1945-1974, Oxford University Press, 1996.
: : >>      (3) On those debates, see Norval Morris, The Future of
: : >>      Imprisonment, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
: : >>      1974.
: : >>      (4) Unless stated otherwise, all of these statistics are
: : >>      drawn from various publications of the Bureau of Justice
: : >>      Statistics of the Federal Department of Justice (in
: : >>      particular its periodic reports on Correctional
: : >>      Populations in the United States, Washington, Government
: : >>      Printing Office).
: : >>      (5) Diana Gordon gives an excellent description of that
: : >>      synergy in The Justice Juggernaut: Fighting Street Crime,
: : >>      Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1991.
: : >>      (6) The State of Illinois has put on the Internet the
: : >>      description and a summary of the criminal record of all of
: : >>      its prisoners, so that anyone can find out about a
: : >>      prisoner's previous offences just by clicking the mouse.
: : >>      (7) See the data compiled by Steve Gold, Trends in State
: : >>      Spending, Center for the Study of the States, Rockefeller
: : >>      Institute of Government, Albany (New York), 1991.
: : >>      (8) That estimate actually makes no distinction between
: : >>      Whites of Anglosaxon origin and people of Hispanic origin,
: : >>      thereby automatically pushing up the level of Whites of
: : >>      European origin. The effect is being compounded as time
: : >>      goes by with rates of imprisonment rising most rapidly
: : >>      among Hispanics in recent times.
: : >>      (9) Title of Jerome Miller's authoritative work, Search
: : >>      and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal
: : >>      Justice System, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
: : >>      1997.
: : >>      (10) For a discussion of these various points, see Lo�c
: : >>      Wacquant, "Crime et ch�timent en Am�rique de Nixon �
: : >>      Clinton", Archives de politique criminelle, Paris, No 20,
: : >>      Spring 1998.
: : >>      (11) David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social
: : >>      Order and Disorder in the New Republic, Little, Brown,
: : >>      Boston, 1971, pp 239-240.
: : >>      (12) Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, "How Unregulated
: : >>      is the US Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market
: : >>      Institution", presentation to the annual congress of the
: : >>      American Sociological Association, 39 pages, 1997, p. 31.
: : >>      (13) Lo�c Wacquant, "Les pauvres en p�ture: la nouvelle
: : >>      politique de la mis�re en Am�rique", H�rodote, Paris, No
: : >>      85, Spring 1997.
: : >>      (14) As shown by David Garland in Punishment and Welfare:
: : >>      A History of Penal Strategies, Gower, Aldershot, 1985, in
: : >>      regard to the paradigm case of Victorian England.

: : This has got to be the most informative and insightful post that has
: : ever  been made to Can.Politics usent, and I've directed it...
: : together with my comments, to the sk.politics, man.politics,
: : Alta.politics and BC.politics usenets.

: : With your permission, I'd also like to publish it on our Saskatchewan
: : Internet News Limited website.
: -- 

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