Locking em up

Christian Parenti located the driving force behind the American prison boom in the need to maintain malleable labor and surplus value.

Glenn Loury saw the brutality of the "justice" system as "a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy" in a post-civil rights era.

And now along comes Eric Schlosser to argue that locking up a whole lot of folks is chic because the "prison industrial complex" provides many lucrative business opportunities, and because it serves a sort of Keynesian function for neglected, rural regions of the country.