"Secure in a Culture of Razor Wire: The Making of America's Gulag"

[pynchonoid]

[...] And so we come to the defining Venn diagram of
this dark shades era in which the so-called war on
terror and the war on so-called low-lives collude with
razor-wired symmetry. One foretold the other. 

We take it pretty much for granted that the response
to the terrorist attacks of 2001 had to be as radical
as the government made them, that they had to
downgrade civil liberties and index mutual suspicions
to a color code, that they had to plump up military
spending and give birth to domestic security's
Frankenstein even though there is not a whit of proof
that any of it makes a difference. But the response
wasn't at all pre-ordained. It was a choice, a bad
choice, driven more by political opportunism than by
evidence. The economy would have been in recession had
it not been for spending on "homeland security," two
wars, and the biggest expansion of government and the
military since the early 1980s. Security firms,
military subcontractors, some police departments,
multinationals such as Bechtel and Halliburton (the
Penn & Teller of nation-building in Iraq and
Afghanistan, at U.S. taxpayers' expense) are happy
profiteers. The safety dividends for everybody else
are harder to see. 

The law-and-order types of the Nixon era, and again of
the 1990s, did the same thing with drugs and crime.
They saw an easy opportunity in fostering a culture of
punishment and an industry to go with it regardless of
the cost to society, or the evidence that whips and
chains aren't the answer to crime as are balanced
laws, strong safety nets and strong economies. The
result: The nation is spending upwards of $50 billion
a year on prisons, an average of close to $70 per
inmate per day. It is an industry "bigger than major
league baseball, bigger than the porn industry,"
according to Wall Street Journal reporter John
Hallinan's recent book on prisons. Companies from AT&T
to Procter & Gamble are cashing in, so are state
governments (the state of Florida made $13.8 million
off of inmate phone calls in 1997). Close to half a
million people earn their living from prison jobs,
double the proportion in 1980. What goes in must come
out: A reverse exodus of inmates is flooding back to
society. They'll be hardened, disadvantaged and
disenfranchised (nearly 5 million ex-felons are denied
the right to vote, including 7 percent of Florida's
voting-age population). Great for the prison business,
but the gulag's safety dividend is just as hard to see
as "homeland security's" dividend. [...] 
Published on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 by the Daytona
Beach News-Journal 

Secure in a Culture of Razor Wire: The Making of
America's Gulag 
by Pierre Tristam

<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-10.htm>

"[...] recall that in the present-day United States,
few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named
"the department of defence," any more than we have
saying "department of justice" with a straight face,
despite well-documented abuses of human and
constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the
FBI."
--Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_





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