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Questions Labor's Leaders Daren't Ask: Where and Why Did We Go Wrong? by JoAnn Wypijewski; Oil on Ice: How Bush Won ANWR' with an Assist from the Dems by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Self-Rehab of George Kennan by Alexander Cockburn; The State and Terri Schiavo: a Conversation with Ralph Nader; Lisa Frittko: She Escorted Walter Benjamin Across the Pyrennes by Lawrence Reichard. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember' we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter' which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else' or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch' PO BOX 228' Petrolia' CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 9 / 10, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair April 8' 2005 Rob Eshelman Hom Raj Acharya
/ Sally Acharya Felice Pace Neve Gordon Mike Whitney Don Monkerud Adam Engel Vicente Navarro Website of the Day
April 7' 2005 Joshua Frank Yitzhak Laor Alan Maass Steven Sherman Dave Lindorff Gerry Adams John Chuckman Michael Dickinson John Ross Website of the Day
April 6' 2005 Peter Camejo Kevin Wehr Matt Vidal Robert Creeley
/ Bruce Jackson Nikolas Kozloff Sea Shepherd Crew Brenda Child Terry Eagleton David Swanson Cindy Ellen
Hill Website of
the Day
April 5' 2005 Jim Connolly Paul Craig
Roberts Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Dan Smith Mark Engler Richard Oxman Greg Moses Website of the Day
April 4' 2005 Kevin Zeese Paul Craig Roberts Larry Birns
/ Sarah Schaffer Karyn Strickler Joshua Frank Michael Dickinson Surendra R.
Devkota Derrick O'Keefe Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 2 / 3' 2005 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Stan Goff John Ross Saul Landau Robert Creeley Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Greg Moses Fran Quigley Kurt Nimmo Nicole Colson Chris Genovali Alan Farago Lawrence Reichard Ben Tripp Avantika Regmi Lee Sustar Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
April 1' 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31' 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
March 30' 2005 Gary Leupp Ralph Nader
/ Kevin Zeese Chase Madar Toni Solo Jackie Corr Ahmad Faruqui Mike Roselle Jude Wanniski Francis A.
Boyle Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of
the Day
March 29' 2005 Ralph Nader Gary Leupp Sonia Cardenas Stew Albert Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Carl G. Estabrook
March 28' 2005 Jeremy Scahill Sonali Kolhatkar Sasha Kramer Kevin Zeese Tom Stephens Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Newton Garver Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
March 26 / 27' 2005 Gary Leupp Peter Linebaugh Marc Robert Laura Carlsen Saul Landau
/ Puja Patel Dave Foreman Fred Gardner Jennifer Matsui Dave Lindorff Dharma Adhikari Joshua Frank Patrick Barr Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Jackie Corr Ben Tripp Dr. Susan Block Mickey Z. Justin Taylor Richard Joseph Poets' Basement
March 25' 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons Yoshie Furuhashi Pat Williams Mark Engler Rahul Mahajan Lance Selfa Ralph Nader John R. Llewellyn Jo Guldi
March 24' 2005 Joshua Frank Talli Nauman Martin Espada Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel Jack McCarthy Jack Random Barbara Ferguson Suzan Mazur Dorreen Yellow Bird Andrew Wimmer
and Mark Chmiel
Patrick Bond Mike Whitney Becky White Michael Donnelly Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ashley Smith David Swanson Derrick O'Keefe Paul A. Moore Dalton Walker Patrick Cockburn
March 22' 2005 William Blum Jim Vallette Greg Moses John Farley Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Dave Lindorff James Petras
March 21' 2005 John Walsh Werther Mike Stark David Swanson James T. Phillips Mike Ferner Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts Stew Albert Website of
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March 19' 2005 Alexander Cockburn Tom Reeves Saul Landau Alan Maass Ron Jacobs David Green John Blair Steve Greenfield Ben Tripp Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Sarah Schaffer Warren Hastings Poets' Basement
March 18' 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17' 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16' 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15' 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14' 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13' 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García'
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11' 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10' 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas' Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9' 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8' 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7' 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6' 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
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March 4' 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3' 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2' 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1' 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
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Weekend Edition A Hesitant Defense of the Not-Quite-as-Bad Old DaysThe US Prison SystemBy JUSTIN E.H. SMITH Montreal, Quebec In previous articles in this space, I have argued that American prisons lack a clearly defined mission. They are caught between correctionalism and retributivism. They are not supported by any coherent philosophy of punishment. This makes them particularly susceptible to influence by those individuals within the criminal justice system who do have a philosophy, of any sort. For the most part, their philosophy, over the past thirty years, has been clear and straightforward: prisons are the site of warranted retribution against people guilty of moral transgression. The left, for the most part, is still caught up in a suspicion, stimulated in large part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, of the earlier, moral mission of correction characteristic of the prison system and of humanitarian groups such as the Quakers in the U.S. for the hundred years or so leading up to the 1970s, and has for this reason been unable to defend against the correctionalist institution's displacement by something far more sinister. However correct the left may have been to raise philosophical concerns about the honesty of correctionalism's claim to care about setting inmates on a course towards happiness and inclusion in society, these concerns do not correspond at all to the present reality of the prison institution. In spite of some vestiges of a bygone era's philosophy of incarceration, the predominant philosophy in the U.S. is one that no longer even pretends to care about the well-being of inmates, and this is something much more frightening than the institution analysed by Foucault. However sharp his indictment of the condescending and generally hypocritical claims of a bygone era's carceral philosophy to be correcting the ways of its wayward charges, Foucault and others in his wake offered very little in the way of a positive program. For him, punishment issues not from justice but from a simple and ineradicable bloodthirstiness in human beings. One thus gets the sense that for Foucault the best way to deal with the need to punish while doing the least harm would be simply to cut off a few randomly chosen petty criminals' heads in a public square and let the other petty criminals run about as before. This does not seem like a realistic option" and certainly does not seem more desirable than the admittedly imperfect reformist do-gooding of the Quakers. In any case, Foucault's negative case against correctionalism has proved succesful"it is now a moribund carceral philosophy. But it would have been nice had he, or someone else, offered a positive alternative. For what the decline of correctionalism has given way to is not an economical and honest way of dealing with a perhaps inborn need to exact punishment, but a bloated and shameful industry, hidden, to the extent possible, from public view. It is hoped that the reader will permit a short excursus, to look at an institution that has developed in many respects in step with the modern prison. (A fuller treatment of the parallels will appear in a forthcoming article of mine in the Radical Philosophy Review.) Until the 19th century, calves and lambs were bled in the street in front of the butcher's shop, or at his stall in the market place; and of course there were stockades and other mechanisms for the public humiliation of prisoners. One might ask why, in the shifting of town centres from town centres to strip malls at highway off-ramps, did they not shift the butcheries and the stockades there as well? Why were these pushed even further out, out of towns and out of minds? From an architectural point of view the factory slaughterhouses and factory prisons are clearly the product of the same civilisation that sprouted Wal- Mart: they are outsized hangars, military in mood, indifferent and massive, clearly intended for high-capacity operation. The only difference is in the size of the signs announcing the different institutions' different purposes. The box stores off the highway may not be quaint enough to make it into any illustrated children's books, but they are still eligible for inclusion in reality. Industrial slaughterhouses and industrial prisons, in contrast, lacking big colorful signs and public parking, are as if non-existent in the modern landscape. This is an essay about prisons, but I believe the fates of each of these institutions in the 20th century are, to a certain extent, parallel to one another and thus mutually revealing. For in each case we see a gradual disappearance from public view of functions that, while always brutal, were once at least acknowledged. With this gradual disappearance, we have been able to convince ourselves that we have surpassed our 19th-century ancestors in humanity and gentleness, when in fact just the opposite is the case. As Noëlie Vialles writes in Animal to Edible (Cambridge University Press, 1994), an ethnographic study of the slaughterhouses of southern France:
Vialles notes that private slaughtering by butchers in their central shops was prohibited in France under Napoleon, and that this brought about an effective "dissociation of slaughtering and butchering." The butcher does not have blood on his hands, he simply deals with a commodity that, by the time it reaches his shop, has been thoroughly de-animalised. The blood- stained hands now belong to the abattoir labourer, an unseen, abstract figure beyond the city limits, who certainly will never make it into any illustrated children's book about our town, its buildings and people. Along these same lines, it might be suggested that since the 19th century we have witnessed a similar dissociation of two very different aspects of our system of punishment. On the one hand, there is punishment's public face, the courthouse, where a presumedly rational process is played out and justice is served. This process takes place in well-marked and accessible buildings; increasingly, it also takes place on television. This is the part the public wants to see, thus the reality shows' on Court TV and the virtually indistinguishable courtroom dramas on the major networks. On the other hand, there is the part not suitable for public viewing or primetime dramatisation-- the part that occurs after the gripping drama of deliberation and rendering of the verdict has already been played out, and there is no longer any compelling reason to stay invested in the characters. The judges and lawyers go on to play in other dramas, the members of the jury return to their homes to resume watching television, while the convict is destined to live out the repercussions of the public chapter of his brush with justice, but now hidden away beyond the limits of the polis, and thus, in a literal sense, depoliticised: removed from the concern of the community, ejected into a black hole. While the industrial slaughterhouse ensures that we need only be exposed to meat after it has been de-animalised and transformed into a commodity, the industrial prison ensures that we need not be exposed to the ultimate product of the justice of the courtroom, namely, to the human being who has been dehumanised and warehoused as a commodity. In both cases, what we are sheltered from is an unbearable transformation, a transformation that many of us are happy to permit to go on on a massive scale even if we would not authorise it for any particular case. The slaughterhouse worker and the prison guard alike are charged with the task of transforming a morally relevant creature into a morally irrelevant thing. And both are thereby stained in a similar way-- how many tough-on-crime carnivores would want either of them over to dinner with the family? (What is said of prison guards here is of course a fortiori the case for those guards who work on death row. In a sense, they make the comparison between the slaughterhouse and the prison more than just a comparison. But we will leave capital punishment for another article.) For however streamlined this process is, however thick the rule-books are that see to the maintenance of strict hygiene standards and rigid adherence to procedure, the great majority of us still sense that something abhorrent is going on. I would not prefer that we return to the occasional public beheading. But in defense of these it is worth noting that they would be far more economical, they would harm fewer people, and they would be honest about what punishment is, rather than concealing it beyond city limits behind anonymous grey walls, in much the same way that the slaughter of a lamb at a market stall is more honest about the nature of meat-eating than a slice of lamb wrapped in cellophane at a supermarket. What I would prefer is a return to the hope expressed by the Quakers that some members of society might genuinely and earnestly be able to help others, that, contra Foucault, not every instance of do-gooding is a thinly veiled maneuver for power and domination. For what the abandonment of the hope of helping others through correction' (an admittedly awkward choice of terms) has brought us is sheer power and domination over warehoused subjects, no longer veiled by the claim to hope to improve their moral character. I would prefer an admittedly largely hypocritical system that claims to be interested in helping its prisoners and occasionally --in spite of the cynicism of Foucault, and because of the sincerity of groups like the Quakers-- just occasionally, in fact does help them. Justin Smith is a professor of philosophy and writer
living in Montreal. He can be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
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