transphobia or self-righteous?

A Nation in Chains

Inside the Homeland, the state of Texas sets the pace, as you might imagine. During George W. Bush's tenure there as governor in the 1990s, Texas had the fastest growing prison population in the country, almost doubling the national rate, as the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice reports. In fact, by the time Dubya was translated to glory by Daddy's buddies on the Supreme Court, one out of every 20 adult Texans were "either in prison, jail, on probation or parole," the CJCJ notes; a level of "judicial control" that reached to one in three for African-American males. George also killed more convicts than any other governor in modern U.S. history as well – a nice warm-up for the valorous feats of mass slaughter yet to come.

But although the U.S. prison population has soared to record-breaking heights during George W. Bush's presidency, America's status as the most punitive nation on earth is by no means solely his doing. Bush is merely standing on the shoulders of giants – such as, say, Bill Clinton, who once created 50 brand-new federal offenses in a single draconian measure, and expanded the federal death penalty to 60 new offenses during his term. In fact, like the great cathedrals of old, the building of Fortress America has been the work of decades, with an entire society yoked to the common task. At each step, the promulgation of ever-more draconian punishments for ever-lesser offenses, and the criminalization of ever-broader swathes of ordinary human behavior, have been greeted with hosannahs from a public and press who seem to be insatiable gluttons for punishment – someone else's punishment, that is, and preferably someone of dusky hue.

The main engine of this mass incarceration has been the 35-year "war on drugs": a spurious battle against an abstract noun that provides an endless fount of profits, payoffs and power for the politically connected while only worsening the problem it purports to address – just like the "war on terror." The "war on drugs" has in fact been the most effective assault on an underclass since Stalin's campaign against the kulaks.

The very nature of our modern culture, with its pressures and predilections for soundbites, and our “complicated, confusing, shades-of-gray world” triggers anxiety that provokes projection of the shadow archetype. As an example of the swiftness with which an archetype can be taken up, the rehabilitation rationale that prevailed from the nineteenth century to the early 1970s was abruptly abandoned when Robert Martinson published a sociological analysis of prison rehabilitation programs, concluding that rehabilitation would never succeed because it was conceptually flawed:



The “immediate and unexpectedly enthusiastic reception” of Martinson’s work and the “extreme and extremely uncritical ways in which were being both promoted and implemented” surprised Martinson himself. We are not surprised; Martinson hooked into the shadow archetype, and the collective embraced the familiar story. Five years later, Martinson published an article retracting most of his earlier piece. No one was interested. We are not surprised by that either. Once the archetype is hooked, played on by politicians and amplified by the media, we become eminently manipulable. When the discourse becomes too vehement or vituperative, perk up your ears, and hear the voice of one seeking to escape from himself.

Source: PARADING THE SAURIAN TAIL: PROJECTION, JUNG, AND THE LAW (PDF)