Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.

April 30, 2011 at 3:32 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected.

November 4, 2009 at 2:45 P.M. Several letters were deleted from words. I have made all corrections, until next time.

October 14, 2009 at 10:22 A.M. "Errors" were inserted in this work as part of the continuing "frustration-inducement" campaign meant to persuade me that "resistance is futile." These continuing harassments are the best proof that resistance is highly effective. I am grateful for the support of many readers. I share their outrage at this visible N.J. censorship effort.

May 21, 2009 at 7:00 P.M. There will be a panel discussion concerning "Torture and the People's Right to Know" at Revolution Books, 26th Street, between 6th & 7th Avenues. The Obama administration has declined to release all of the phographs of tortures at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Civil liberties groups (me too) are disappointed to learn of this decision. I hope that, eventually, all of those photographs will become part of the historical record.

I am unable to access my msn account at this time. My computer is under attack, please see "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" at my msn group, Critique or at "Philosopher's Quest." No images can be used. I believe this is because of the political content of the images that I have used at MSN. One of the ways in which power seeks to cope with strong criticisms is by furtive assaults and defacements of dangerous texts. This essay will be subjected to attempts at "error insertions" and destruction. I will do my best to cope with such attacks. Spacing between paragraphs may be affected by cyberattacks. I cannot see my books or know whether they continue to exist. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")

I am sure that such censorship efforts could not take place without the cooperation of the authorities in a society committed, publicly and legally, to freedom of expression. Is this commitment a lie? For as long as my computer functions, I will keep writing. If I cannot continue writing, then any alterations of these works in my absence should be seen as more censorship and torture. "Errors" were inserted in this introductory paragraph and in other works -- including obstructions of images in an essay dealing with the writings of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan. Perhaps Justice Brennan was a member of Al Qaeda? However, I cannot believe such an accusation.

"In this sense power, in which we are, sees the crumbling of its fundamental consensus rise from its own inner being. What I want to point out most, within the limitations of this essay, is the homology between these continuous processes of breakdown described (in a fairly allusive form) by Foucault and the function Barthes assigns to literature within the system of linguistic power."

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1983), p. 252.

I.

How do societies in a scientific age deploy the resources and technologies of the social sciences for domination and control of populations? How do they generate and make use of fear and rage in people? What are the forms of effective resistance to such oppression? Is technology, science or the Internet only another site of struggle for power, as Foucault suggests? If so, can philosophy be different? Is resistance based on truth and consensus possible? (Habermas)

This discussion is not about hating America or any one society. America is simply the paradigmatic society to examine because the U.S. has already arrived at the destination to which most First World nations are headed. To fail to understand this crucial point is to be trapped in a modernist political rhetoric or theory, while living in a postmodernist situation. The obvious thinker to consult on these issues is Frederic Jameson. I hope to write soon about Cornel West's discussion of Jameson's views. For Jameson, there is a logic to our forms of political and economic organization today -- in advanced or late capitalist societies (which increasingly includes China) -- linked to scientific and technological developments, leading us in a cultural direction that is somewhat alarming. See Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-93; and also Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983).

The struggle for freedom with equality today has become much more complex because our cultural environment has become highly intricate and technologically sophisticated. We are surveilled and monitored, indexed, filed, tested, urine and blood samples are taken and results are saved. Psychologists and others record our responses, test our reactions, "consult" with corporations and governments, for a small fee (often secretly), happily suggesting the best techniques for suppressing dissent and ensuring conformity in a "value neutral" manner, since they are "scientists." ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

As I write this essay, New York is considering placing another 3,000 cameras in key sections of Manhattan, where thousands of cameras may already be found. All federal buildings -- such as post offices -- are filled with cameras and other monitoring equipment. Every computer transaction, purchase with a credit card or check, swipe of a subway card is accessible by government agents. The deluge of information without adequate filters is predictable and will often make that surplus of information useless.

At issue is the distinction between knowledge and information. (Bertrand Russell) Ideally, both knowledge and information will allow us to achieve some wisdom. (George Santayana) I believe that this surfeit of information and lack of synthesis had something to do with 9/11. Facts are worthless without theoretical vision (interpretations) making them MEANINGFUL. However, there is a totalitarian mind-set that will always opt for more control or facts at the expense of meaningful knowledge leading to effective control or security. This form of fascistic stupidity may well account for many of our recent blunders and evils in the world. It is not only about facts or information, but security is essentially concerned with knowing what the facts mean today and (more importantly) what they may mean tomorrow.

I am sure that controversial Internet sites and writers are monitored. I am probably monitored by some government agents every time I go on-line. I feel sorry for them. At least they're going to learn a lot of philosophy. Power no longer respects national boundaries. Legal systems and processes are bypassed as we learn to live with alternative realities, existing secretly and ignored in the public "forms" of law. Oppression has become so subtle that we fail to appreciate its omnipresence. "We are all implicated," Duncan Kennedy comments, "in the social evils that we wish to see transformed." This may be a good time to insert an "error" in this essay.

Imprisonment is a principle in contemporary societies. This means that all of us are now incarcerated to some degree. Imprisonment is also a part of the system by which all others are incarcerated. America has become Bentham's "Panopticon." Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vinatge, 1977), pp. 195-228 and Schechem Lafayette, Women Behind Bars (Georgia: Stone Mountain Pub., 2006), pp. 43-51 (abuse in women's prisons).

This surveillance and the reality of torture is in tension with America's foundational commitment to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. If we are looking to the U.S. Supreme Court for protection of our rights, unless we are corporations, we may be disappointed. Ronald Dworkin, The Supreme Court Phalanx: The Court's New Right-Wing Bloc (New York: NYRB, 2008). (The Conservative justices on the High Court are guided by "partisan, cultural, and perhaps religious allegiance.")

Perhaps this tension between those who see America as a fortress empire and those who see it as a Republic open to the world has always been part of our history. Even earlier than 1776, we find in Thomas More's Utopia, for example, a hope for a dialogical public square in which discussion is open-ended and free. This dialogue itself is numquam, U-topos -- "nowhere," or the "everywhere" that is a free society. Thomas More, Utopia and Other Writings (New York: New American Library, 1984), pp. 103-109 ("Letter to the University of Oxford"), writings selected and edited by James J. Greene and John P. Dolan.

Add to Foucault's theory of this governmental "language" of the "disciplinal" -- something which, to my knowledge, no American legal academic has yet done -- Jacques Lacan's reworking of Freudian theory, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," in Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Structuralism (New York: Anchor, 1970), pp. 101-136. If we think of America as a collective mind, then prison spaces become a territory for consigning the forbidden and twisted fantasies of power and domination, fantasies which are always sexual, sexist, racist and class-based. Prison is the place where all that is forbidden and sanctioned is "enjoyed," where power expresses its obscenity and cruelty most perfectly, through sanctioned oppression of the least fortunate members of society. American prisons are the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno. AP, "Prisoners Say They Were Raped On Job Detail," in The New York Times, October 13, 2009, at p. A21. (Women inmates raped by guards on a job detail, then repeatedly thereafter, as an ingredient in their prison experience.) ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Not One More Victim.")

"Contributors to the book paint a backdrop to the massive expansion in the prison system over the past four decades. Mandatory drug sentencing passed in the 1970s fueled the increase, further escalated with economic restructuring and the war on the poor. As activist Julia Sudbury outlines in her essay, 'Unpacking the Crisis,' Reaganomics ushered in increased spending on prisons and the military, and cuts to social programs. 'With social expenditures decreasing, criminalization has become the primary response to growing poverty,' she writes. 'Women's poverty is criminalized in numerous ways."

Lee Wengraf, "Women in the American Gulag," in International Socialist Review, May-June, 2010, at p. 75. Review of R. Solinger, P. Johnson, M. Raimon, T. Reynolds and R. Tapia, eds., Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (Los Angeles; University of California Press, 2010), 480 pages. http://www.isreview.org/

It is important to understand what is done to "control" inmates in penitentiaries because, next week, it may be done to you on the factory floor, to your child at school, to your spouse in a hospital room, even to your parents at the senior citizens' home. Furthermore, there is a continuity between the lives of inmates and those of residents in society. These categories are always overlapping, while methods of controlling populations are also overlapping and expanding:

"The authors of 'Confronting Confinement' emphasize that few of the problems inside prisons truly stay confined. Ninety-five percent of those who go in also come back out. The problems that arise inside prisons, the authors write, go home 'with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day's shift.' The most obvious example involves the 1.5 MILLION people who are released from prisons and jails each year with an infectious disease -- tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV, and drug resistant staff infections. They are a threat to everyone, but especially to the residents of minority neighborhoods from which they are disproportionately drawn."

Jason DeParle, "The American Prison Nightmare," Volume 54, Number 6, The New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007 and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20056 (see also Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, by John J. Gibbons & Nicholas B. Katzenbach, co-chairs Vera Institute of justice, and at http://www.prisoncommission.org/ ) Solomon Moore, "Study Shows High Cost of Criminal Corrections," in The New York Times, March 3, 2009, at p. A13. (Statistics are updated concerning the costs of American prisons, costs which are higher even as crime is worse today than when I first wrote this essay.)

Another "infectious disease" often acquired in prisons is violence. Those victimized by violence learn the language of violence -- in order to survive -- so they can then be blamed for violent actions when they leave prison. As a result, they are subjected to more violent treatment, thereby becoming even more violent in response.

Women are sexualized in society -- as "objects" to satisfy the yearnings of powerful men especially -- and are even more sexually objectified in prisons. They are then demonized and stigmatized in society for their sexuality. What do we expect from people whose sexuality (women) or violence (men) are requirements of survival in their social settings? ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

Regardless of what we expect, what we will get is endless cycles of repetition of violence and rape directed at women or those deemed to be "like" women. AP, "Beating of a Gay Man is Denounced," in The New York Times, October 13, 2009, at p. A26. Women who are highly sexualized, wielding an impermissible erotic power, who are then punished or even destroyed for erotic energy. Witches? Men who are strong and violent in defense of an identity and independence that is not permitted to them, who are then punished or even destroyed for this strength and independence. The system generates conduct that it uses to legitimate State criminality, defined as "control."

The dialectical dance between power and sexuality is at the center of contemporary social experiences that seem remote from such concerns, political and legal experiences being clear examples. Stephen F. Eisenman, "Theater of Cruelty," in The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 101-110 and David Keiser & Lovisa Stannow, "The Rape of American Prisoners," in The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2010, Issue 77, at p. 16 (reviewing National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report 259 pp. (2009) and other titles. )

Contradictions and tensions between competing images and conceptualizations of normality and abnormality (linked to power and sex) resurface in a number of places in culture. I recently saw a film in which persons were taken to a slave ship to experience the stench and feel of the chains used to bind slaves. (See "Amazing Grace.") Today, that slave ship is a U.S. penitentiary.

There is a danger that American society has become a slave ship for millions of citizens -- perhaps for all of us -- both in prisons and on the "outside." The most effective chains are now invisible. They are made up of electronic monitoring devices, cameras, genetic information banks, tracking of all credit card purchases and media consumption along with other means to control and, supposedly, "determine" behavior -- including psychological or so-called "mind control" techniques first developed by intelligence agencies. These techniques have escaped from our prisons, where they are used, secretly, entering society -- also secretly. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")

See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" as well as Corey Kilgannon, "Hypnosis Rigged Sex Case Against Him, Man Says," in The New York Times, October 20, 2007, at p. B2. Compare Duncan Kennedy's "The Stakes of Law, or Hale and Foucault," in Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 83-126 with Judith Butler, "Violence, Mourning, Politics," in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York & London: Verso, 2006), pp. 19-50.

Much of the violence common to the so-called "underclass" is induced in people through deliberate "frustrations" for purposes of observation and control. Maybe that is why New Jersey officials or their hirelings are always inserting "errors" in my essays, including this one. Much the same is true in prisons. Nobody is surprised that poor people who are overcrowded, highly stressed, threatened, angry become violent. Prisons are not only slave ships, they are "factories for the production of monsters." Most of those monsters -- male and female -- will be living next door, eventually. This should make you nervous.

At this holiday season there are thousands of men wandering around the streets of this city with no jobs and without any likelyhood of ever having a job in today's economy, other than at a fast food restaurant or cleaning floors. Many of those men will risk their lives rather than accept such a fate, or the status of a sub-human, like many of the tragic victims of racism I see wandering through a reality they no longer understand or fully inhabit. This was the fate prepared for me, I think, which is still sought by those inserting "errors" in this text. I am confident that they will not succeed in destroying my mind. Perhaps they have succeeded with others, men and women. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

Sometimes the violence is generated by guards (or social scientists) who hope to "learn" from victims or perpetrators. Inmates are often not seen as human beings worthy of respectful and decent treatment. Basic human rights are ignored or violated by self-styled scientific observers of so-called "deviants," with seeming impunity, so long as they act secretly. It is only a matter of time before more such violations of rights become routine -- if still secret -- in society. The thought that any Jewish person could be a part of such Mengele-like evil is terribly sad and frightening. (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and, again, "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

American social scientists deliberately frustrate, insult, stress the victims of "testing" in the prison setting in order to generate conduct that will allow for additional inflictions of pain and suffering on their chosen persons-victims. Rationalizations that are quite elaborate permit these "prison professionals" to believe -- often sincerely -- that they are merely engaging in scientific efforts to control or "study" deviance. I suggest that cruel social scientists and so-called therapists are really offering us a demonstration of the effects of sadism on victims of torture. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "America's Holocaust.")

These sadistic social scientists are the true deviants and monsters. Each time that you see an "error" inserted in this essay remember this sentence. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

We live with a "friendlier" form of totalitarianism than our ancestors experienced -- until we start asking annoying questions, of course, when things may get a little rough. However, it is still totalitarianism. We are losing more freedoms and independence every day. One of the objectives of this penal-political system is to create a state of massive disconnection among people, systematic social frustration, distraction, and anomie. Despair is disabling. It is good for power if people are both stressed out of their minds and depressed. It keeps them from focusing on who is doing what with their money or upon how power is being misused against them. (See: "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

Paranoia is also great in this regard. Instilling fear and distrust of neighbors and co-workers, especially those from different ethnic groups or races, religions or ethnicities, can be very convenient for powerful rulers in complex societies. Community bonds among people are just the opposite -- they are empowering for ordinary people -- whereas alienation and even schizophrenia is much more conducive to efficiency, if your goal for society is "order" rather than "liberty." It is no coincidence that prisons are racially divided as well as violent. Increasingly, so are Western societies. See Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 and Gilles Deleuze, "Foldings, or the Inside of Thought," in Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), pp. 315-347. ("New Jersey's Mafia Culture in Law and Politics.")

The first objective of postmodernist revolutionaries is to reject violence along with all forms of racial, religious, ethnic or other divisive prejudices. A new, highly sophisticated language of propaganda-imagery and media-manipulation is crucial in the task of social passification. There is also a language of institutions, a rhetoric developed for interacting with the "machinery" of the State taught to people, often surreptitiously, that serves a vital role in controlling subjects.

The question today is whether these instruments of control can be turned into people's weapons in the struggle for liberation. Among the instruments of control are items you may not associate with oppression, like your t.v. set and your computer. In response to psychological violence there is philosophical liberation. ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series" and "A Review of the t.v. Series 'Alice.'")

I seem to experience a great deal of interference with my cable signal in one television. I wonder why? My Internet access is obstructed regularly. How strange? My Internet writings are damaged as part of an intense effort to discourage on-line writings by me. I understand all too well why Mumia Abu-Jamal is still incarcerated and subject to the death penalty. Mr. Abu-Jamal's real offense is literary and political genius. Mumia Abu-Jamal, "Interview From Death Row," in J. Fletcher, T. Jones, S. Lotringer, eds., Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the U.S. War Against Black Revolutionaries (New York & Paris: Semiotexte-Columbia, 1993), pp. 117-201 and Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live From Death Row (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 73-115.

One mode of discourse in this language and culture, again, is the penal system and prisons. Prisons are a "mode of discourse." They are a way of speaking to -- or threatening -- all people in society designed to make obvious what is less obvious elsewhere in the system. There are some aspects of power that are nakedly visible in prisons, but only veiled in society -- so far. If Michel Foucault is correct, then the prison has become one model of the State. Hence, this explains why incarceration becomes a matter of degree in postmodernist cultures. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Paul Rabinow. ed., The Michel Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 51-75 and Michel Foucault, "May, 68' in France," in Remarks on Marx (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 144 ("... that which was ill-tolerated and continuously questioned, was power.")

The locus classicus for Foucault's views of power and prisons, again, is Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Now read the novel and see the film Cool Hand Luke. Luke is the classic example of Norman Mailer's "White Negro." That film may help affluent white people to understand the issues discussed in this essay. Today, all of you are in that prison with Luke -- unless you are among the fortunate few with enormous wealth in America. Care to spend a night "in the box"?

Millions of African-Americans and many so-called "weirdos" (like me) will be doing just that tonight, literally and figuratively, spending a night in solitary confinement. We have been presented with a forced choice that white "mainstream" America does not wish to see or face. We are required to choose between violence and acceptance of authority -- usually illegitimate authority -- by being made to "conform" to demeaning stereotypes. Some of us have rejected both options:

"... faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, [authenticity,] which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian, for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares growth."

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," in Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 355.

One solution is to transform physical violence into creative effort and philosophical thought leading to a revolution in our morals, politics and laws. This is to see philosophy as the ultimate example of Andre Gide's acte gratuite. Authentic or free action = philosophical "violence" in the service of progressive change. Tariq Ali & David Barksamian, Conversations With Tariq Ali: Speaking of Empire and Resistance (New York & London: The New Press, 2005), pp. 123-173 and Paul Ricoeur, "Power and the State," in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 736-746. For an example of what I mean, see my essay "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women."

Umberto Eco investigates the semiotics of "Disneyworld" and suggests that the unreality of postmodernist societies is concealed from residents by creating a space where unreality is heightened. The illusory quality of daily experience is even greater in that artificial setting, leading residents to believe that their so-called normal lives are "real." Similarly, the systematic injustices and oppressions, enslavements and tortures taking place in more subtle and hidden forms in contemporary technological societies are increased and made visible in prisons -- which become an alternative and dark "Disneyworld" -- intended to persuade people that they actually live in a free and just social setting outside of prisons. This device or rhetorical move is only another mechanism of control. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review" and "'The Island': A Movie Review.")

But then, "control" is hunky-dory with defenders and beneficiaries of power, such as Stanton Samenow, Ph.D., Inside the Criminal Mind (New York: Crown, 1984), who contends that criminals "choose to commit crimes" because "they like being criminals." Presumably, brutality is o.k. in efforts at incapacitation in order to ensure the safety of Mrs. Samenow. "Dr." Samenow's idotic and uncharitable, unfeeling and stupid book is actually a rationalization of sadism and cruelty. Horrifyingly, this low-brow diatribe is taken seriously by some judges, usually judges who do not read much.

It is amusing to see the reaction to President Obama's flawless first one hundred days. Republicans are desperate to find something to criticize. Republicans have yet to succeed in detecting an error by Obama. The First Lady's appearances in New York this week (Lincoln Center) are perfect examples of how to discharge the duties of her office -- that is certainly what the position of First Lady has become, a public office -- while promoting culture and the arts in America. Mr. and Mrs. Obama are in the midst of altering America's archetypal language of racial images in the collective subconscious of the world. As a result, both of them are feared, hated and loved by different groups in this country, also throughout the world. A lot more of us feel and express love for the Obamas than the opposite.

The reaction to the Obama family among most people in most places is overwhelmingly positive. However, there are some pockets of racism and hatred that will always exist. We can no longer wait for everybody to understand what must change in our culture. For one criticism of the Obama administration -- which may be the best U.S. presidency of my adult lifetime -- see above my comment concerning the decision not to release torture photos. I think the Obama administration needs to catch a second wind as the mid-term elections approach. The feeling of disappointment concerning this administration is spreading. "In the Age of Obama: Police, Terror, Incarceration, No Jobs, Mis-education -- What Future for Our youth?" A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Carl Dix, Friday, October 29, 2010, 7:00 P.M. Harlem Stage, at Aaron Davis Hall, 150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York, NY. http://www.harlemstage.org/

These postmodernist realities are challenges to America's Constitution that the framers of that document could not have envisioned. None of this is discussed or analyzed in U.S. law schools, with very few exceptions, where courses on tax laws and how to avoid them are very popular. Most judges are incapable of grasping these philosophical and jurisprudential issues, much less of trying to cope with the challenges to legality raised in our new theoretical situation. For example, New Jersey's Supreme Court has earned a reputation (which is well-deserved) as one of the least competent and most corrupt state high courts in the nation. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

For a brilliant defense of the so-called "unfinished project of modernity," see: Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), pp. 266-294 and Jurgen Habermas, "The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault," in Critique and Power, pp. 47-79, then Alex Callinicos, "The Spectre of Kant: Language, Society, and Reality," in Against Postmodernity: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), pp. 104-113 (interpreting Habermas).

The space in which carnival-meets-carceral-culture has become our true public square. It is an electronic and media-centered territory, where politics has become show business -- and (as usual) money has a lot to do with how things "go down." If only it were possible to land on an aircraft carrier and declare "victory" in the war on crime, I am sure that politicians would have done so by now. Perhaps they have done much the same in advocating mandatory "get tough" sentences and "three-strikes-you're-out" statutes. The most grotesque example of a "get tough" non-solution to crime is the death penalty. Social pathologies and coping with them is not best thought of as a baseball game in which one side is allowed "three strikes."

"Free" persons will not see all of the ways in which they are also exploited, even on the outside, tortured and oppressed, enslaved by a thin slice of the population getting very rich on their labor. The last statistic I saw indicated that most of the corporate wealth in American society is owned by less than five percent of the population. That less than 5% of the population in America makes up what Dave Chapel calls "the real white people." If you get rich enough in America, then you may get to meet them. More than 80% of America's corporate wealth (see Michael Moore's documentary on "Capitalism") is in the hands of little over 1% of the population in October, 2009. These are the people represented on Wall Street who are receiving "stimulus" funds. I bet lots of Americans can use some stimulus funds. I wouldn't mind some money to purchase cookies and milk today.

Rather than asking "what is happening to our freedoms?" citizens will say to themselves: "I must be free because I am on the outside; whereas, people on the inside -- within prisons -- are not free." It will not occur to people to wonder whether they are simply accorded a few more privileges than inmates while still being very effectively "controlled." Accordingly, the best political question to ask today may be: "How much freedom are you really being granted?" Try testing the boundaries of that freedom by challenging the system. You'll find out quickly enough that you're not so free.

Any more illegally inserted "errors" today? Has this essay been altered or vandalized again? Beyond objective/subjective, fact/value and other exhausted dichotomies is a new "field-thinking" in cultural spaces that detects the presence of control and manipulation in what presents itself as freedom (law, politics) or culture (t.v. sit-coms, pop-music, fashion). It is in this new territory where categories collapse that we must wage a postmodernist cultural battle for freedom and equality in opposition to power, also a struggle to define ourselves as Americans. Hence, Cornel West becomes "A Council Member" in "The Matrix: Reloaded." Compare Ian I. Mitroff & Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What it is Doing to Our Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 44-71 ("Boundary Warping") with Mark Rowlands, Everything I Need to Know I learned From T.V. -- Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 1-27.

"What is the idea?" Walter Benjamin asks, " ... to speak of progress to a world sinking into the rigidity of death?" 25,000 persons will die of hunger today. Another 25,000 are desperate enough for water that their lives are endangered. 10 million more will die of AIDS in Africa alone within the next 5 to 10 years as fossil fuel consumption in the First World further damages the global eco-system. Do we need to devote millions in journalistic resources to what Paris Hilton is wearing to the L.A. County jail? Robert Mitchum -- Ms. Hilton's predecessor at that facility -- described prison as similar to "the Beverly Hills Country Club, but without the riff-raff." Ms. Hilton was given the option of having her food in jail delivered by caterers. I do not care or want to know with whom Tiger Woods is (or was) having an affair.

In a culture where more than 90% of people -- including lawyers and judges -- lie every day of their lives, accusations of lying are made against me only when people are confronted with painful truths. New Jersey is a legal fraud. N.J. is a theater of brutality and theft disguised with the forms -- not offering the reality -- of due process of law. If you believe that America's founding revolutionaries would have approved of this situation, "kinder and gentler" totalitarianism, then you do not know those people or have any sense of who they would be today. Many of America's framers would either be in prisons themselves or dead in contemporary America, I believe, since their struggle was for greater freedom and what is being lost today -- everywhere -- is precisely freedom. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Concerning Americans lying every day, see 1996's The Day America Told the Truth. The statistics are probably worse among lawyers and politicians. Notice that I am making a point about who America's revolutionaries would be (and are) today. Is America heading towards the nightmare that New Jersey has already become? I hope not. We forget that the American revolution was waged with the idea in mind that "the struggle will not be finished until we hang the last king on the guts of the last priest." That does not sound like a Broadway musical to me. (An "error" was inserted by hackers in this paragraph. I have just corrected it.)

Thomas Jefferson said: "the tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants." The man who uttered these words was a freedom-loving and communitarian thinker of the "unfinished project of modernity," whose genius may be aligned with the thinking of Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Habermas in the German tradition.

What happened to that Jeffersonian vision? Don't ask. The best place to find resistance to power today may be in radical philosophers such as Angela Davis or Assata Shakur. These women are fighting for your freedom, unless you are a billionaire investor in the prison "services" industry. What follows is an attempt to set down some thoughts concerning the hermeneutics of imprisonment. What is the "meaning" -- or suggested "meanings" -- of prison and prison-generated culture in America as a kind of SOCIETAL "control"? Who gets subjected to this "control" and why? What aspects of society are heightened in prisons -- sexism, racism, violence, disparities in power? Or is it all of the above? Why those aspects and not others?

If your interest is in the dark side of America and other wealthy societies, you must study the phenomenon of imprisonment. Angela Davis is one of the very few American philosophers who have understood this. Many or most women in American prisons are either: 1) victims of sexual assaults; or 2) deemed "sexual outlaws." There is still something about women's aggressive sexuality that is unforgivable in American society. (An "error" was just corrected in this last sentence.) A woman who likes sex and her independence early in life is already a "deviant" and on her way to prison. On the other hand, what women are taught to value about themselves is primarily their sexuality. They are taught that sex is their only means of earning admiration and attention or having power, then they are demonized for their expressions of sexuality.

See what I mean about schizophrenia? America is one of the few countries in the world where women (not men) have been committed to mental institutions for "excessive sexual appetite." Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge: Perseus, 2002), at pp. 287-291. America is also obsessed with "sex goddesses" and "swimsuit issues." Everyone in U.S. society, publicly, disapproves of erotic entertainment. Porn is a $10-15 billion dollar a year industry. Among investors in the adult entertainment industry are most American corporations and financial services industries. Women are charged with crimes in prostitution scandals; promiment politicians making use of their services are not indicted.

How could any woman not be disturbed and damaged in this situation of contradictory messages concerning who she is expected to become? If you love a woman who has been hurt by this nonsense, then how would it be possible for you to avoid being hurt just as much? ("Would you have helped Kitty Genovese?")

"For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the 'we' except by finding the way in which I am tied to 'you,' by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know."

Judith Butler, Precarious Life, p. 49. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Another very effective means of control is the "prison for the mind" produced by isolation and denial of philosophical power. Very few minority or poor young people, especially girls, are exposed to philosophical writings in a meaningful rather than watered down or chastened way. Philosophy is dangerous stuff not only because it leads thinkers and students to question shibboleths of the society, but (more importantly) because it results in a development of powerful new techniques and methods of thinking -- a new way of apprehending the world, intellectually -- which is inconvenient for rulers of so-called "empires" or security-minded nations. By the way, "shibboleths" just means the bullshit spouted for purposes of public control, the sacred beliefs of a community that are placed beyond questioning. Poor women and whites, minorities from the underclass in capitalist society must be denied access to "philosophical lightning." (Karl Marx)

II.

My answers concerning the semiotics and hermeneutics of U.S. prisons may surprise you. Much of my discussion develops at a theoretical level, making use of writings by Foucault, Davis, Laing, Eco, Deleuze, Butler and other theorists of "deviance" and the politics of prison culture. I will make creative use of British legal philosopher Gillian Rose's appropriation of Foucault and of the work of Angela Davis. Compare Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Poststructuralism and Law (London: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 171-208 with Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), pp. 40-84. It proves much of what I have to say if you, as a young working class person, have never heard of these people. Christopher Lasch, "From Culture to Politics," in George Fischer, ed., The Revival of American Socialism: Selected Papers of the American Socialist Scholars Conference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 217-227.

I will refer to statistics concerning all U.S. inmates. However, I am especially interested in women's experiences of imprisonment. Women are even MORE outrageously violated and unjustly treated than men. Sometimes these injustices worsen the problems that have brought women to prison in the first place. Sadly, efforts to deal with the underlying causes of women's antisocial behavior are the first things cut from prison budgets -- behavior which is not only understandable, but sometimes the only rational response to some insane situations in which many women find themselves. I have no doubt that, if I had been born a woman, I would have been sent to prison by now for outrageously independent and "inappropriate" opinions -- despite my shapely legs, along with my talent for baking and homemaking. Arundhati Roy, "Bhumkal: Walking With the Comrades," in International Socialist Review, May-June, 2010, at p. 30. (The Maoist movement in India is receiving almost zero coverage in American media, including the important role of women in that movement.)

R.D. Laing suggested that there is no such thing as "insanity." There are insane situations to which persons "adjust." Prison is an insane situation. By the same reasoning, it appears that there are no "innate criminals" or morally "inferior" persons -- deviance or criminality is not a matter of "brain chemistry" or race -- but there are situations of extreme political and social injustice that people resist, as a matter of retaining their humanity. Some "offenders" in prisons are terrible human beings; others are among the bravest and most undefeated of the poor and socially oppressed populations, especially among women inmates. It is vital to distinguish among these groups of "offenders." John Braithwaite, Inequality, Crime and Public Policy (London: Routledge, 1979), pp.24-32, 58-62. (I discovered this author thanks to a brief article by Mark Kelman, also anything by William J. Chambliss or Michael Tigar is recommended.) (See "'I Am Legend": A Movie Review.")

To love a woman who has been incarcerated, for example, is to accept that all of the tortures and rapes that she has endured must be shared with her. It means loving her even more, making an effort to understand her suffering by setting aside all ego nonsense, while trying to place her need for encouragement and affection ahead of one's own. It is infuriating to realize that a person who is mostly the victim of heinous and undeserved injustices, beginning very early in her life, can be transformed in society's (and even in her own) estimation into a moral leper -- mostly as a way of assuaging society's guilt at the failure to prevent or deal adequately with atrocities resulting from sexism, cruelty, violations of girls and young women, or all children.

Pompous mediocrities in judicial robes and blue suits are the true monsters, not you. Most of those people -- and I've known them well -- could not have survived half of what some (or most) women in penal insitutions have lived through and overcome. Very little effort is being made today to provide incarcerated men or women with opportunities to attend college classes, to develop artistic or other skills that may be transferred to the economic market upon release, to help ease the transition and return to society for these persons. For instance, helping inmates to reconnect with people who love them, who may provide the support and affection that they need to avoid additional criminal behavior in their future lives. I just finished reading a book on the philosophy of science which contained an unexpected description of dehumanization of victims in Nazi concentration camps:

"Remember, one of the most fundamental things about the concentration camps is not that people were beaten and tortured, burned and killed, but that there was a deliberate attempt to degrade and dehumanize people from the outset. For instance, it was a simple piece of policy in a concentration camp that women's lavatories and the men's latrines faced each other accross a wire in the open and that you were not allowed to perform your physical functions (which often, in the conditions of imprisonment, with that kind of food, were extremely distressing) except in full sight of people of the opposite sex."

J. Bronowski, Magic, Science and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 82.

Now consider the routine strip searches and humiliations in American women's prisons:

"[Strip searches] are an everyday routine in women's prisons that verges on sexual assault as much as it is taken for granted. ..."

Every woman I have heard speak of this experience has described strip searches as sexual assaults:

"... The notion that female deviance always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized. Thus, white women labeled as criminals are more closely associated with blackness than their 'normal' counterparts."

Are Prisons Obsolete?, pp. 63-68. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

The association with "blackness" allows for ever-greater dehumanization and enslavement. Guards will feel less or no guilt about what they do to such inmates, especially when it comes to sexually violating incarcerated women. Imagine that sort of experience of humiliation happening to someone you love. How would you feel? What if you don't know what is happening to her? What goes through your mind every day? How do you sleep while pondering the torments that she may be experiencing?

You don't sleep. You think about power and how it is imposed on people, internalized by subjects, so that they can be made to torture themselves. By torturing inmates, everyone in society is tormented and made more amenable to control because everyone is a potential inmate. I suspect that this kind of sadistic reasoning explains the continuing violations of my copyright protection and sanctioned illegal vandalisms of my writings. The levels of incarceration and the societal expense in teaching this lesson ("conform") is reaching astronomical levels, with the result that we are producing more and not less criminal behavior, along with an increased lack of conformity among people who have "experienced" the system. Perhaps there is a lesson in this experience for how we should conduct our struggle against terrorism. "Get Tough" tactics may be counter-productive:

"For the past thirty years, the United States has been on an imprisonment binge unprecedented in world history. In 1980, the total number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was 500,000. Today the number stands at 2.2 MILLION, with a further 4.8 MILLION on probation or parole. The total U.S. prison budget increased from $9 billion in 1980 to $61 BILLION in 2003[now closer to $70 BILLION.]"

I guarantee you that, despite what you've heard, most of that $61-70 BILLION is not going to provide cable t.v. or swiming pools for inmates. This amount is more than the entire national budget of many other governments in the world. The next paragraph provides crucial information in support of much of this theory:

"While the U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world's population, it now has 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In other words, the country that often proclaims itself the freest in the world, imprisons its population at a rate over six times higher than the rest of the planet. The U.S. incarceration rate stands at 737 per 100,000, over five times higher than Great Britain and over twelve times higher than Norway. The statistics for minority populations are even more shocking." ("Havana Nights and CIA Tapes.")

As someone who has experienced torture, to the indifference (or maybe at the request) of corrupt U.S. state courts, together with daily criminal harassment and frustration efforts directed against my communications, I can attest to these facts. As someone who has committed no crimes, I find this treatment by state government offensive and unethical. By the way, it is also criminal and unconstitutional. How do you live with your hypocrisy as New Jersey's "Chief Justice" Stuart Rabner? How can American judges and tribunals be complicit in criminal civil rights violations and cover-ups, then have the nerve to speak to me of "ethics"? ("Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics" and "Massive Corruption Sweep in New Jersey -- Again.")

"For Latinos, the imprisonment rate is twice the national average. For Blacks it is FOUR times the national average, with OVER ONE MILLION African-American men in prison or jail. In 2002, 10.4 percent of all Black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned, and the numbers have not improved since then."

Phil Gasper, "Prisoners of Ideology," in International Socialist Review, March-April, 2007, at p. 18. (All of these statistics are worse today.)

For a fraction of the costs of imprisonment, young African-American men can be educated at local universities. Society prefers to incarcerate those young men. It is more lucrative for some people to do so. For a fraction of what it costs to house and monitor female offenders, they can be returned to the community and monitored at a distance, in employments that are financially productive, while allowing them to retain family and other social bonds. Most people in American prisons do not have to be incarcerated. Most inmates do not belong in prisons. Imprisonment serves to deliver a message of control -- to those who are not imprisoned -- and provides a laboratory for the (often secret) testing of technologies of repression and supervision to be used, eventually, against civilian populations. That means you. ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "Senator Bob Says -- 'Xanadu and You Are Perfect Together!'")

America's technologies of control are worthy of Dr. Mengele's experiments on Jewish children. They include use of stress or anxiety, professional destruction or economic harm to victims and family members, also worse things are done to people. (See "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

Prisons are also about money. Politicians have friends in the prison industry. The prison industry has friends in politics. You scratch my back; I contribute to your election campaign. An inmate once described working in the yard and seeing a truck enter the prison, loaded with supplies, ostensibly for inmates -- clothing, sneakers, other items -- then he saw the truck exit the prison without unloading its cargo. I believe him. (See "Mafia Influence in New Jersey's State Police" and "An Unpleasant Encounter With New Jersey's State Police.")

That truck's contents were no doubt listed as having been "distributed" to inmates. What happened to those goods or who benefitted from their sale is something no one will know, except for any "public servants" involved in an illegal sale of such goods. Right, Richard J. Codey, Esq.? I probably purchased some sneakers at a mall that were ripped off from the taxpayers. I suspect that such transactions are common. Inmates are often screwed by pillars of society working in prison administration. But then, so are the rest of us. The biggest thieves are not in prison. The biggest thieves I have known are in New Jersey government and law, until they can make into the "big time" in Washington, D.C. "On the one hand, but on the other hand ..." Right, Senator Bob? Garcia? Gonzales? How are the "alleged" accounting problems, Mr. Ginarte? ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey's Ethical Legal System" then "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers on the Tit.")

Inmates are in prisons to convey multiple messages: Certain behaviors that are deemed "deviant" will not be tolerated. For women, as I continue to insist, there is almost always a sexual aspect to the labeling process or in the history of "offenses"; for men, there is usually violence, often against rich whites. Poor whites they don't care too much about. Hence, at least one coded meaning of incarceration is: "offenses against the social order and harm suffered by middle class whites will result in prison sentences and further brutalization, preferably for minorities and poor whites."

The goal is to persuade those who are not incarcerated that the "mild" forms of coercion they live with on a daily basis are tolerable and necessary to preserve social order, meaning protection from "them." And "them" means unruly dark people or working class white guys and gals. The persons from those groups not in prisons or menial jobs can be sent to Iraq. I will focus on two points made by Gillian Rose in her discussion, then I return to the analysis by Professor Angela Davis. Professor Rose comments in her discussion of Foucault's work:

"For, according to Foucault, theory posits itself as the neutral voice of the whole of society, but acts as a bogus third or judge of the juridical stage and colludes in its judgments which are no longer of innocence or guilt, but of normal and abnormal, in the administrative technology of the post-legal stage. Nihilism is to complete two revolutions in one: to cut off the king's head and the head of the specious administrator. To the objection that this practice is blind and runs the risk of reinforcing what it seeks to abolish, Foucault reiterates his celebration of the 'dark moment,' for all eyes are implicated in the old order; he affirms an absolutely different future, and reminds us of the powers that are waiting to be taken." (P. 172.)

There is no universally accepted scientific definition of "normality." What is "normal" is highly individualistic and context-sensitive. For an exhaustive treatment of this topic of normality, see Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 104-105. (The Index provides "criteria of normality.") Nobody can tell you, scientifically, that your life-style choices or relationships are "abnormal" in other than a statistical sense. "Normal" is what is right for you. This is an objective standard of normality.

A few letters have been removed from words and other minor damage to this essay, but less than I expected to find at the hands of New Jersey's hackers. My response will be to focus soon on "sexual abnormality" on the part of more New Jersey judges. Irony intended. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Foucault intuits an alleged irrelevance or bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project and U.S. Constitutionalism under these circumstances of control. Changes in rules are irrelevant. What matters takes place secretly, outside of the order envisioned by law and is concerned with "normalizing" people by turning them into "docile subjects" no longer requiring "control" -- because they have been absolutely controlled already. They are controlled by conditioning them to internalize a representative of the social order ("a tiny policeman") to keep them in harness. Worse is a proposed internalization of a so-called "therapist," inflicting psychological pain between spouting banalities. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

This "postmodernist" challenge to liberal legal order and the legitimacy of modernity's political vision -- which is found in America's legal system -- has mostly been ignored by that legal system, further eroding its global claim to legitimacy or respect. The truly despicable actions of malignant social scientists (like New Jersey's own Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli, also others) defies understanding in classical terms, as does the continuing protection of such persons in a legal system that is increasingly at war with reality because of its shameful failures. America's Constitution provides answers to these dilemmas, but not if the issues are ignored:

"... the apparent humanization of punishment," Foucault insists, "is the effect of control, and not, as one would have expected, the benevolent vehicle of its diminution. This extension of control is traced by conceiving of individuals not as 'persons' but as 'bodies,' culminating in the disciplinal, a 'form of justice which tends to be applied to what one is, this is what is so outrageous when one thinks of the penal law of which the eighteenth century reformers [the Framers of the U.S. Constitution] dreamed, and which was intended to sanction, in a completely egalitarian way, offenses explicitly defined by the law.' " (p. 175.)

The roots of this view of persons as "bodies" may be traced from Hume to Bentham, all the way down to today's positivists, who see law in strictly externalist and consequentialist terms. This is not science. It is the ideology of American forensic psychologists and political scientists as well as courts, which is doing great harm to millions of persons and to the Constitution. The essence of a liberal legal order, which takes the dignity of persons seriously, is narrowly defined offenses, opportunity to respond to charges, notice and confrontation -- everything understood by the idea of "due process of law." Freedom of subjects is guaranteed by law, coupled with their equality as holders of rights who must be respected.

Absolute secrecy from government agencies is the enemy of freedom. Rationalizations of secret tortures outside the scope of law is worthy of Orwell's "Big Brother." When lawyers providing such a rationalization of evil government power that has resulted in rapes, beatings, murders and continuing deprivations of freedom are not charged with crimes -- nor even accused of unethical conduct -- then the very idea of American legal ethics becomes absurd. ("Torture and America's Legal Ethics" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")

When social science techniques and psychological methods are deployed, surreptitiously, by unidentified agents of the state calling themselves social scientists or (absurdly) "therapists," against non-criminals who are citizens, then all of these due process guarantees and humanistic values are rendered obsolete or farcical. This is what is meant by "urinating on the Constitution." See Judith Butler, "Indefinite Detention," in Precarious Life, pp. 50-101 and "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?" (See also "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "America's Holocaust.")

Therapy has nothing to do with what these so-called "therapists" are nor with their actions. They are torturers and information-gatherers for the machinery of law enforcement in society. Torturers generate and become the excretions of society's anus. (Again: "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

As a law student in the eighties I read numerous articles by Alan Dershowitz examining the relationship between psychology and law. Many of the concerns expressed in those articles about the loss of judicial autonomy or excessive deference to "experts" have now become reality. Gerry Spence's book Madness and Law, as I recall, is recommended to all law students for the example of cross examinations of psychiatric experts who had no real idea of what they were talking about. People's lives have been destroyed by such "experts." None of those materials were ever assigned in law school courses. I suggest that you read, carefully, Mr. Spence's cross-examination of a forensic psychiatrist for the state. Most of the "science" that such people claim to know is bullshit. Furthermore, their scientific opinions coincide with astonishing ease with the interests of those providing hefty fees to the "expert witness."

You may begin to see why philosophers speak of persons being made into "gender criminals," or "underminers of law," as classically understood. Roberto Unger's concept of "deviationist doctrine" comes in handy to argue that our notions of what is legally relevant -- or what is law -- must be expanded under these new cultural conditions. See Unger's essay "The Critical Legal Studies Movement," at volume 96 of the Harvard Law Review. Unger's essay is one of the most important law review articles of the last fifty years which is mostly unknown among judges who (often) cannot understand Unger's arguments. What we have now is more subtle "uses and ruses of power," making legality only a public pretense and the lived reality for subjects strictly a matter of "control under a regime of power," where the very concept of legitimacy is laughable. Governmentality has replaced due process as the method of public power. (Butler, pp. 51-58.)

This subtle and highly dangerous challenge to Americans' liberties is a far greater concern than any specific threat posed by terrorists. Indeed, today's terrorists against the Constitution may wear judicial robes and claim to speak on behalf of the law, even as they defecate upon the legitimacy of the judicial process. (See "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Going to Make Us an Offer We Can't Refuse," then "What is 'homeland security'?")

Norman Mailer says: "The bad conscience of society comes to focus in the burning lens of the penitentiary." "Introduction" to Jack Henry Abott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison (New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. xiv-xv: "It has been my experience that injustice is perhaps the only (if not merely the greatest) cause of insanity behind bars." Your offense is no longer something that you have done, but who and what you are -- which is deemed "abnormal" or "deviant" -- especially when you presume to invoke the authority of law as "an officer of the court" for "unusual" purposes, like real political justice for society's victims. Worse, to be more intelligent and learned than the powerful is to guarantee your own destruction by envious mediocrities. I continue to insist that Mumia Abu-Jamal's political genius is feared and hated because of racism. ("The Heidegger Controversy" and "Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!" then "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

A woman must not be sexually free and independent, according to this system, nor irreverent and uncontrollable. A minority male must not be smarter than rich white counterparts. The system insists that African-American men must not be strong, intelligent, and/or powerful. Attorneys must not call into question or ridicule the integrity of a system that has lost its integrity. I know about that too. (See the film, "The Advocate," also "And Justice for All.")

"Unseemly criticisms" of courts are not allowed? The courts and those who sit on them have too often become "unseemly." What is grotesque and obscene is the sight of corrupt mediocrities wearing judicial robes, as in New Jersey, committing crimes and struggling to cover their asses when this criminality is exposed even as they presume to judge the ethics of others. The tortures I have experienced and my daily struggles against criminal censorship and destruction of my intellectual work is one proof of what I say. There must be more victims, among whom is that one person whose welfare troubles me (as does the condition of all persons I love), every minute of every day. Think of what family members of persons missing in action in Vietnam felt. That's what I feel right now. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Subversive identities threaten the unspoken order of society and must be punished. And they are. If there is no "outside" -- nothing to which one might appeal, such as the Constitution, morality, or God -- then there is only power. It becomes meaningless to protest against cruelty and inhumanity under nihilism. Foucault says: "resist, be cruel, laugh at them." The Foucaldian response -- or Baudrillard's tempting "fatal strategies" says -- "Fuck 'em." Trash the system. (A letter was "deleted" from this sentence since I last reviewed the essay.) I call this the "Colbert Report" response. It is certainly tempting on occasion. However, it seems inadequate to me, reducing oneself to the level of the system's failures.

Drucilla Cornell, "The Ethical, Political, Juridical Significance of the End of Man," in The Philosophy of the Limit (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 170-183. If you are a brave soul, try this little gem of a law review article: Drucilla Cornell, "Institutionalization of Meaning, Recollective Imagination and the Potential for Transformation," in 136 University of Pennsylvania Law Review pp. 1135-1229 (1988). I seem to remember a good article on Unger's jurisprudence by Professor Cornell that kept me at the law library until very late. Maybe this was it?

Another response is to love victims of power, hold them close, affirm their humanity -- even as the mechanisms of the state deny that humanity -- insist on the dignity and beauty of the slave, as others deny those things to her, offer her respect and admiration, as she is denied both by the representatives of society. Resist dehumanization and brutalization with a display of humanity and kindness towards those unfamiliar with such things as society's victims of torture and oppression. Confront power with love. This second option is much more difficult. However, for me, it is the best response to social evils. My sources are obvious: Christianity and the African-American struggle. Never give up on the possibility of rational persuasion or on the power of America's Constitution. Never stop speaking truth to power. Insist on the universality of that Kantian dignity essential to legal rights for every person. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

My essay examining Justice Brennan's views of human dignity in Constitutional theory has been vandalized, though it is still readable. Ironically, Justice Brennan was a great champion of free speech rights, whose ideas, as summarized by me, are subjected to suppression by government officials from the Justice's native state -- New Jersey -- probably emanating from a courthouse named for him. The foregoing sentence was vandalized by New Jersey persons between stealing sprees in Hudson County. ("Debbie Poritz Likes the Ladies!" and "Is Joel T. Leyner, Esq, New Jersey's Slimiest Fixer?") Try it again, boys.

"No black will leave this place" -- prison -- "if he has any violence in his past, until they see that thing in his eyes. And you can't fake it -- resignation, defeat -- it must be stamped clearly across the face." George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York & London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 190-191. Now see the "psychological torture" of Mumia Abu-Jamal detailed in Amnesty International, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance (Amnesty International, 2000), p. 51: "You're standing there alive and they're asking you where to send your body. After surviving a death warrant I felt like I'd lost my soul -- it kills part of you." ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

Imagine a psychiatrist telling a victim under hypnosis that someone is aiming a rifle at him and that he is going to be shot. What would that do to a person? Imagine a person under hypnosis being told that persons are at his door to arrest him and torture or kill him? Or to do the same to his family members? Imagine "errors" inserted in your written work fifty or more times PER DAY that are corrected by you on each occasion in a society that "criminalizes" violations of civil rights. 25-50,000 hits at this site are not counted "approximately." I wonder why? ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

If you discover that you are willing to accept death for what you believe, then you will not be intimidated by anyone. You will then have understood what Malcolm X meant by "speaking truth to power." No wonder they wish to insert "errors" in this essay. When it comes to the African-American struggle for equality and freedom. All of us -- regardless of skin color -- must feel this life-or-death level of commitment to peaceful revolutionary change in America. (See again: "America's Holocaust" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Death must be preferable to slavery for all of us. Foucault's nihilism and his willing exploration of the darkness within -- the internalized oppressor -- reveals a tendency toward masochism together with his sexual eccentricities that may limit the usefulness of his message for all "practical" reformers. However, others contribute to the expansion of Foucault's project in a more pragmatic direction. For example, Professor Rose notes:

" ... 'Transgression opens on to a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine 'no' that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core.' [Nobody is or can be entirely abnormal or inhuman.] Yet there would be no scintillation in a world without shadow: in absolute light as in absolute darkness nothing can be seen -- there would be no 'world.' ... Transitivity is not broken if nothing is affirmed: Foucault's language shows him firmly within that dialectic which he claims to have transgressed: 'Transgression then is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful ... rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.' The serpent instead of swallowing its tail, that old symbol of dialectic, has twisted itself into a spiral, and this is anounced as the detaching of existence, 'so pure and so complicated ... from its questionable association to ethics.' ..." (p. 205.)

The parentheses were deleted from the above quote by New Jersey's OAE Whores and "Walking Turds." I have now restored that removed letter. In response, I will devote more attention to the "Lesbian Love-Fest" in Trenton, including the alleged participation of "Nydia" and her pal, "Martha." Leather outfit, Anne Milgram, Esq.? How do you like being addressed in these terms? There are people spoken to in these ways and worse, every day, who will not emerge from such experiences filled with the milk of human kindness.

Affirm the dialectic. Insist on casting out from legitimacy the "technologies of domination," with their shadowy essence as "methods of torture and forgetting," instrumentalities of totalitarian oppression -- even when they are wielded with a smile and said to be "for the victim's own good." Deny the fig leaf of social science legitimation and rationalization to the reality of sadistic torture. "What we've got here" in all New Jersey law and in America's prison system is not a mere "failure to communicate," but pleasure and evil resulting from abuse of power. Confront the sytem's controllers with the foulness and STENCH that they have become -- revealing their distance from their own professed values -- while loving and nurturing the victims of power, those men and women broken on the wheel of our "nicer" forms of dictatorship, whose very identities have been criminalized. Hope that those wounded souls will "be." (See "Habeas Corpus.")

Deleuze suspects that such a project of "hope when there is no hope" became Foucault's final mission -- much too late, as he was increasingly suffering from AIDS. Foucault's final work approaches (I know that this is an academic "sin") a most Christian affirmation of the Other and celebration of the self in, or as, "love." At the end of his life, Foucault moves towards Dr. King's position:

"... the theme which has always haunted Foucault is that of the double. [The alternate or sinful self in need of acceptance and love.] But the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a redoubling of the same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not an emanation of an 'I,' but something that places in imminence an always other or a 'Non-Self.' It is never the Other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other: I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me ('it is always concerned with showing how the Other, the Distant, is also Near and the Same.') ..." (Deleuze, "Foldings, or the Inside of Thought," in Critique and Power, at p. 318, emphasis added.)

Now think about RACE. Mirrors and doors. A woman I love lives me through the gift of her pain. Deleuze understood Foucault's final project in terms of foreshadowing death as orgasm. Yes, I know, the Freudians are salivating. To achieve a giving of the self to others, whether in pleasure or pain, or as both, becomes prayer or hope. "This culminated," Deleuze writes, "in [Foucault's] searing phrase: 'in getting free of oneself.' ..." (p. 316.) Deleuze neglected to add that this self-giving might well take place today in a "theater of cruelty." (Antonin Artaud) I can think of no better phrase to describe American prisons than "theaters of cruelty." You may say the same of my writing experience under these conditions of censorship and oppression. "Writings in a Torture Chamber."

Every inmate in america remains a part of us on the outside; but all of us are also implicated in the lives of incarcerated men and women. No life is without human dignity or the possibility of redemption.

I am in prison. So are you. The torture and enslavement of your African-American neighbors is your torture and enslavement. Still favor the death penalty? I hope not. Such a project is a long way from nihilism, but very close to good old Christianity and the ecstasy of Romanticism. Now do you understand why African-American culture is highly romantic? I do. Artistic beauty, religious or mystical bliss, sexual climax -- are things that the State cannot control, not yet! -- even as it seeks to prohibit or restrain them -- something which is impossible. The affirmation of the "dark moment" of struggle becomes that intense instant of loving passion and commitment at the center of Christian Romanticism which is FREEDOM. ("Amistad" and "The Color Purple.")

"Give us free!" Has become the cry of millions of people in the world. Cornel West and Roberto Unger are the scholars to read on these issues, see Passion and Knowledge and Politics. Monica Davey, "Missouri Officials Debate Executions Even as the State Prepares to Carry One Out," in The New York Times, May 14, 2009, at p. A14. (Spiritual struggle exists even in the choice to make a legal execution one's own dignified death.) There is, finally, reason to hope that N.J.'s hackers may be brought to justice: "California: Federal Judge Postpones Sentencing in a Cyberbullying Case," in The New York Times, May 14, 2009, at p. A15.

Ms. Milgram, how can you call yourself "Attorney General" while condoning cybercrime and worse offenses? Have you no sense of your ethical responsibilities? ("Dead Man Walking.") Bob Driehaus, "Ohio Death Row Inmate Asks for a Delay," in The New York Times, September 29, 2009, at p. A27. (Inmate subjected to various execution attempts which failed and were then repeated over a period of hours.)

No matter what anybody thinks or says, I will love her until the day I die. Further attacks on these forbidden words are always expected: "Philosophy conceived in this [revolutionary] spirit is simply context-smashing continued beyond the point where it is normally prudent to carry it, continued, as it sometimes is in poetry or politics, for the sake of the future, which means for the sake of a certain way of living in the present, as people not wholly defined by the forms of their existence."

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passion (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 88. (See Denzel Washington's performance in "Man On Fire.") ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

Angela Davis used similar language in defining herself as a "revolutionary," as I recall from an interview on the David Susskind show that I saw as a very young man. Professor Davis was not much older at the time. Angela Davis explores in important philosophical work realizing Foucault's project -- work which has yet to receive the full attention that it deserves -- the necessary intersection of gender and power in postmodernist prison politics and culture, while affirming the authenticity of the eternal "moment" of struggle. In shared struggle, Praxis, and through love-making we live an eternal Faustian "now":

"But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in women's prisons an important element of radical analysis of the prison system," Professor Davis asks, "and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls." (Slavery?)

What you are seeing is a kind of "sexual abuse" -- added to many forms of rape in my life -- because the people deleting letters from these writings are addicted to cruelty. "The purpose of torture is torture." (George Orwell) They are engaging in this content-based censorship by making use of government power in knowing violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal criminal laws because they like it sexually. In prison these people can do whatever they like to human beings who are mostly without remedies of any kind against their cruelty because they will not be believed when they complain of rape, physical abuse, or other victimizations.

I am suggesting that there are very good reasons for that retention of the vitality of cruelty, within prisons, that then makes such horrors (mostly) unnecessary on the outside. The purpose of our "theaters of cruelty" is to deliver a message to spectators in our "Society of the Spectacle" -- conform or we will destroy you. Prison is a cruel spectacle intended as political theater. American prisons are a combination of slave ships, gladiatorial games, and classrooms for unwilling victims of indoctrination. Prison is about incarcerating people outside of prisons. We must not allow the Internet to become an American prison. This is why China does not want Google to dominate searches on-line in their country:

"The destructive combination of RACISM [your skin does not have to be dark for you to be treated like a black person in prison] and MISOGYNY, however much it has been challenged by social movements, scholarship and art over the last three decades, retains all its social consequences within women's prisons. [A slave ship?] The relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in women's prisons is one of many such examples. The increasing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global resonances leads us to think about the extent to which the many corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the prison system are, like the state, directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women." (Davis, p. 83, emphasis added.)

Violence against women is a spectator sport in prisons. Women's sexual exploitation remains an "offstage" presence in society, increasingly legitimated, because it is an "onstage" and sanctioned reality in prisons. If you love a woman who has been incarcerated -- who has lived with such horrors -- then everything that has been done to her, again, has been done to you. All of it has been done to me. This is true regardless of whether you are a man or woman. Do you honestly believe that suggesting that we "pretend that nothing happened" after years of torture has any meaning for me? Adjust? You are judging my "ethics"? New Jersey lost the right to judge my ethics and character a long time ago, if they ever had such a right.

Foucault-Rose-Davis invite us to come to terms with the continuity of these social territories, prison and civil society. We must realize that the battle for our freedoms and dignity -- especially if you are a woman or a minority group member, or any poor person in America -- is being fought right now in prisons. Unless you are a major stockholder in one of the huge corporations "involved" in the prison industry, you are one of the inmates and not one of the guards. If you have been exploited or raped -- if your rights have been violated by power -- then you are a woman in American society. This is true regardless of your sex organs or sexual-orientation. See Angela Davis, "The Prison-Industrial Complex," in Are Prisons Obsolete?, at pp. 84-104.

Just as authorities use inmates to control inmates, so society uses members of oppressed classes to control others subjected to exploitation. If I wanted to play such a role in America, then I would be a very wealthy man today. All of the prison guards at Abu Ghraib were blue collar, working class or lower level persons with a tiny number of minorities thrown into the mix. This tactic gives the authorities the option of dismissing the tortures as "aberrations" caused by "those low-class people." The legal profession is much the same with token "low-functioning persons" placed in political office to serve the interests of power. Senator Bob? Joe Coniglio? Jim McGreevey? Anne Milgram? Nydia Hernandez? That's how you get rich as a lawyer in America -- by serving power and not justice. The fact that I am speaking this truth is what they do not like in America's legal system.

If the status of despised racial designation is a "free-floating signifier" -- anybody can be coded as "black" in today's America -- then so is the status of "female" or "bitch." If you are poor in America, then guess what that makes you?

Since my last reading of this essay numerous "errors" were inserted in the text. I can never know whether I have corrected all of them or whether these errors will be reinserted five minutes from now. However hurtful to me it is to experience daily destructions of my writings, attempts to suppress intellectual work and political censorship, I will continue to struggle against these evils. I hope that you also will struggle against the oppression described in this essay.