Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 23:09:43 -0600 From: tomdill-AT-wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM) Subject: Re: madness John Ransom's posting of the article from the Times on the fate of the "mad" in our society is certainly pertinent to the study of Foucault. I would add, for much the same reason, the article by Patricia J. Williams from _The Nation_ (March 9, 1998) called "The Slough of Despond." I cannot quote the whole piece here, but her take-off is from an encounter with welfare recipients being lured into a program to train them as prison guards (reported in the Wall Street Journal--where else?) "a bold program to launch people straight from welfare into demanding careers--as prison guards,' it is sponsored by what in another era we might have thought of as an unholy alliance between the Department of Corrections and the Department of Social Services, and is designed to address a 30 percent growth in South Carolina's inmate population since 1990." Williams goes on to observe "Prison expansion is the fastest growing industry in the public sector of the American economy." And as has been pointed out in several recent articles (references on request), it is also a very fast-growing industry in the so-called "private sector" -- the prison-for-profit movement may well realize Bentham's ideal panopticon if allowed--the statistics clearly indicate that as the profit motive kicks into the prisonmanagerialcomplex, the incentive is to fill those beds (just as, macabrely, the hospital industry needs to fill its beds at the same time the insurance companies are forcing sick people to go home)-- so we have the spectacle of increasing numbers of adolescents tried as adults as well as vastly increasing groups of imprisoned though non-threatening individuals. The obsession with control (observation videocameras more and more frequently installed, police patrolling formerly public places--paradoxically "public" but extensions of the private life, now neither public nor private but observed and regimented) is only one of the forms of dementia afoot among the polity as we approach the silliest reification -- the "millenium" (remember all those times the Big Guy came down and ended the world before--well, same as it ever was, here he comes again!). Tom Dillingham
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005