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XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.usa.republican
XPost: alt.politics.bush, alt.law-enforcement
From: MMDEG@milwaukee.com
Hmmm...I read this and all your subsequent posts regarding
prisons.....well...ok, I lied, I didn't read them all word for word. I have
a life.
I did realize one thing though. You should stop worrying about prisons, and
start worrying about hospitals.....the mental ilk. Get help!
"_ G O D _" wrote in message
news:VfwDb.718297$6C4.365922@pd7tw1no...
>
> Down with prison
>
> The common belief that prisons are full of dangerously anti-social
> people from whom the rest of us must be protected is a lie. It is a lie
> so popular that even to question it is deemed to be an act of the
> wildest utopianism. We are taught to regard the imprisonment of the few
> as some kind of guarantee of the security of the many. But the many
> feel far from secure. And the imprisoned are mainly harmless, or
> harmful only to the extent that they are treated as they are.
>
> As a child I remember a cop coming to the school-cum-prison in which I
> was being educated-cum-indoctrinated-cum-incarcerated to tell us all
> about what would happen if we broke the law. He carried the authority
> of a man born only a little too late for a career in the Gestapo and he
> terrorised little children with fears of the dire consequences of their
> wrongdoing.
>
> Boys with stolen sweets in their sticky pockets almost wet themselves.
> The cop painted images of dark dungeons presided over by men with the
> tolerance of Old Testament gods. We all agreed that this was no place
> to end up in. Next time our class went shoplifting the look-out
> arrangements were especially vigilant.
>
> Years of being conditioned to fear the awfulness of prison hardships
> and indignities has done much to strengthen the unhealthy respect for
> property which so pervades the working class. Most people are afraid to
> take any of what they themselves produce, not because they believe it
> really 'should' belong to the property-owning minority (the real
> thieves) but because they dare not break the thieves' laws. They are
> scared. The prospect of prison is supposed to make us scared.
>
> As a means of teaching people to respect private property prisons are
> remarkably unsuccessful. Most inmates come out with more knowledge
> about how to get away with breaking the law than they had when they
> entered. There is no evidence at all that prisons do anything very much
> except scare people who are not in them and brutalise those who are.
>
> The tragedy is that most of those in there have been quite well enough
> brutalised by the deprivations and degradation of being propertyless in
> a property society without needing a prison regime to roughen their
> edges.
>
> The vast majority of the prison population is locked away for one
> reason: they have violated the sanctity of property - taken what does
> not belong to them. Why have they done this?
>
> Aside from the odd cases (not infrequently fictitious) of millionaires'
> wives roaming around department stores and stealing for attention, the
> main reason for stealing, whether from shops or cars or houses or
> workplaces is lack of money and lack of the hope of making a mark in
> society without gaining things which cost more than can be paid for.
>
> Stealing is a consequence of poverty and of powerlessness. Take away
> these factors and who need steal? (Take away money and property and who
> 'could' steal?)
>
> Millions of prisoners are incarcerated across the world simply for
> disagreeing with the government. From the tortured wretches in the
> hell-holes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (apparent international
> enemies, but all at one when it comes to the Dictatorship of Property)
> to those in Britain who refused to become conscripted killers in time
> of war (the "crime" which sent so many socialists to prison) or pay
> their poll tax, what are these but prisoners of conscience?
>
> It doesn't pay to stand by your principles under capitalism. In China
> there are approximately ten million political prisoners locked away in
> camps. Don't hold your breath waiting for the trade boycott.
>
> And yes, there are the few - a small minority even within the minority
> of the prison population - who are so damaged, so ruined by their
> upbringing and circumstances, and so driven to brutality that they have
> murdered, raped and committed unspeakable acts of cruelty and
> inhumanity. Is the humane response to brutalise them further by locking
> them in cells and punishing them for what society has made them?
>
> It has become a commonplace of mean-minded conservative sneering to
> deride those of us who counsel compassion and understanding for those
> whose deeds the tabloid press choose to call evil. (Their evil-spotting
> becomes remarkably myopic when it comes to nuclear buttons and bombs
> dropped from legalised terrorists in the name of international order.)
>
> Well, call me a "do-gooder" (which is preferable to being a do-badder)
> or a softy, but the truth is that only spite can justify taking an
> inadequate person and making them less adequate by throwing them into
> the hopeless despair of imprisonment. These places are an affront to a
> society which declares itself with haughty arrogance to be civilised.
>
> They are monuments to the barbarity of a system which cannot afford
> compassion and support for the damaged and so buries itself in the
> futile and spiteful torments of punishment.
>
> Jan
>
>
> www.worldsocialism.org
>
>
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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