ideology is that a person’s human rights depend on what they can get
for themselves in the market system, they have no human value.
Larger and larger sectors of the population have no form of
organization and no viable, constructive way of reacting, so they
pursue the available options, which are often violent. To a large
extent, those are the options that are encouraged in the popular
culture.
You can tell a great deal about a society when you look at its system
of justice. I was wondering if you’d comment on the Clinton crime
bill, which authorizes hiring 100,000 more cops, boot camps for
juveniles, more money for prisons, extending the death penalty to
about fifty new offenses and making gang membership a federal
crime—which is interesting, considering there’s something about
freedom of association in the Bill of Rights.
It was hailed with great enthusiasm by the far right as the
greatest anticrime bill ever. It’s certainly the most extraordinary
crime bill in history. It’s greatly increased, by a factor of five or six,
federal spending for repression. There’s nothing much constructive
in it. There are more prisons, more police, heavier sentences, more
death sentences, new crimes, three strikes and you’re out.
It’s unclear how much pressure and social decline and
deterioration people will accept. One tactic is just drive them into
urban slums—concentration camps, in effect—and let them prey on
one another. But they have a way of breaking out and affecting the
interests of wealthy and privileged people. So you have to build up
the jail system, which is incidentally also a shot in the arm for the
economy.
It’s natural that Clinton picked up this crime bill as a major social
initia tive, not only for a kind of ugly political reason—namely, that
it’s easy to whip up hysteria about it—but also because it reflects
the general point of view of the so-called New Democrats, the
business-oriented segment of the Democratic Party to which
Clinton belongs.
What are your views on capital punishment?
It’s a crime. I agree with Amnesty Interna tional on that one, and