[p2p-research] UK's universal credit

[Michel Bauwens]

a very taoist piece in a way, out of catastrophe something good may always
been born ..




On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:22 PM, j.martin.pedersen <
m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 14/11/10 15:19, Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote:
> > Next step : "prisonfare"... ?
>
> The Prison Boom Comes Home to Roost
>
> By James Carroll  |  November 8, 2010
>
> The Boston Globe
>
>
> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/11/08/the_prison_boom_comes_home_to_roost/
>
> WILL THE fiscal collapse that has laid bare gross
> inequalities in the US economic system lead to
> meaningful reforms toward a more just society? One
> answer is suggested by the bursting of what might be
> called the "other housing bubble,'' for these two years
> have also brought to crisis the three-decade-long
> frenzy of mass imprisonment. If there was a bailout for
> bankers, can there be one for inmates?
>
> It is commonly observed now that, beginning about 1981,
> during the Reagan administration, the wealth of a tiny
> percentage of top-tier earners sky-rocketed, while the
> wages of the vast majority of Americans went flat. A
> rapid escalation in the illusory value of homeownership
> soon followed. But an unseen boom began then, too -- in
> American rates of incarceration, the housing bubble in
> prisons. A recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of the
> American Academy of Arts and Sciences, lays it out. In
> 1975, there were fewer than 400,000 people locked up in
> the United States. By 2000, that had grown to 2
> million, and by this year to nearly 2.5 million. As the
> social scientist Glenn C. Loury points out, with 5
> percent of the world's population, the United States
> imprisons 25 percent of all humans behind bars. This
> effectively created a vibrant shadow economy: American
> spending on the criminal justice system went from $33
> billion in 1980 to $216 billion in 2010 -- an increase
> of 660 percent. Criminal justice is the third largest
> employer in the country.
>
> But while prisons boomed, something else was happening
> -- a trade-off. As sociologist Loic Wacquant says, the
> government was simultaneously slashing funds for public
> housing. In the 1990s, as federal corrections budgets
> increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by
> $17 billion, "effectively making the construction of
> prisons the nation's main housing program for the
> poor.'' State budgets took their cues from Washington
> in a new but unspoken national consensus: poverty
> itself was criminalized. Although "law and order'' was
> taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was
> fully bipartisan, as Wacquant shows, with the most
> ferocious growth in the incarceration of poor people
> occurring in the Clinton years. "Welfare as we know
> it'' was replaced by punishment. States went
> prison-crazy.
>
> But the current fiscal crisis has blown a hole through
> all that razor-wire. State budgets suddenly cannot
> afford prison systems, which universally choke off
> funds for education, transportation, and
> infrastructure. Some states, like California, consider
> simply releasing prisoners because jail time in
> mega-prisons costs too much. And, equally suddenly, the
> whole system has become morally dubious as well. While
> a famously over-exuberant economy was built on the lies
> of bankers tied to an artificially inflated housing
> sector, the prison boom depended on racist and
> class-biased "criminology'' that was, in fact, steadily
> debunked by penal experts. Just as irrational
> assumptions of "risk assessment'' prompted mortgage
> brokers to understate the risks of home ownership, they
> led prosecutors, in a parallel noted by Berkeley law
> professor Jonathan Simon, to grossly overstate the
> risks to society of huge numbers of defendants. The
> housing bubble, Simon shows, devastated neighborhoods
> by littering them with abandoned properties. The prison
> bubble devastated neighborhoods by depriving them of
> fathers and husbands.
>
> The American double-binge has come to an end. In
> Simon's image, the era of the "big house'' is over,
> whether the McMansion in the suburbs or the mega-prison
> in a field. Here's the question now: Can the war on the
> poor be returned to the war on poverty? This is not
> simply opening gates and letting criminals go free,
> although the harsh fact must be faced that many
> convicted of non-violent, mainly drug offenses, never
> belonged behind bars in the first place. But
> transferring government over-investment in
> incarceration to re-investment in education and public
> housing is the only real correction to the massive
> "corrections'' mistake we made. Re-inflating "America's
> punishment bubble'' makes no more sense than trying to
> re-inflate the housing bubble.
>
> We must all regret the illusions we embraced, and that
> have been so painfully shattered, but, as Simon argues,
> "We must also recognize the opportunities that the
> present disasters have created for reinvigorating our
> economy and democracy.''
>
> James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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