"And is there a general trend in the way the U.S. approaches incarceration?"

Gary Gibson's other weblog is at... http://www.Lulu.com/GaryCGibson

"And is there a general trend in the way the U.S. approaches incarceration?"

Someone mentioned that Wackenhut runs prisons all over the world for profit. I would imagine that some trend might be that toward switching around prisoners from nation to nation in order to conform to the torture designs an administration prefers to utilize, or to minimalize the traditional legal tools of habeus corpus and right to a speedy trial. Bringing for-profit prisons into a neo-Corporatist trend of governance seems a logical step toward corrupting the democratic society.

The trend toward mass-marketing prisoners in an era of mass-marketing goods and mass-marketing politics through broadcast brainwashing again seems reasonable enough in that one should anticipate those creeping, coinciding trends of corruption to develop as social identity of the individual is mass-marketed to be formed for the use of business and government.

A late Texas Poet wrote about the duplicitous nature of mankind and government. Even Commercialized 'Christianity' may be redesigned to accomodate all into the fold of state requirements...

Eighth Air Force by Randall Jarrell

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a can
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving
Whistles O Paradiso!--shall I say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

The other murderers troop in yawning;
Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one
Lies counting missions, lies there sweating
Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.
O murderers! . . . Still, this is how it's done:

This is a war . . . But since these play, before they die,
Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man,
I did as these have done, but did not die--
I will content the people as I can
And give up these to them: Behold the man!

I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,
Many things; for this last saviour, man,
I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?
Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:
I find no fault in this just man.

Since the earliest and perhaps best efforts at rehabilitation in Pennsylvania prisons the success rate has declined perhaps, and instead mass production in creating an underworld and off-line populist underworld/working class synergy with incarceration has brought society into a more malleable status regarding neo-Corporatist transnational political management-worker policy.

With the national unemployment rate at approx. 5%, and the underemployed rate at perhaps 20%, with another 5% that have become discouraged and stopped looking for work, President Bush's plan to make 8 million illegal aliens lawful workers is itself virtually criminal. Pimping the value of U.S. citizenship is of the least concerns for a prosperous, aloof trans-nationalist though.

It would be difficult to provide better prison rehabiliation training than the poor and homeless can afford for obvious reasons of justice. With such subversion of the U.S. poor by President Bush it is unlikely that prison education can improve much either. As Texas prisons run toward transnational ownership increasingly, pay and not sentence guidelines are whats meaningful to the wink-torture administration I'd guess.