epidermises bristle

how do we comply with these professionally/"scientifically" developed discourses of criminality on a day to day basis? Our complicity is cemented in fear; we, like Hooton, have adopted a fear of our own destruction, individual and social. In developed codes regarding the criminal, we have done our best to define appropriate behavior in order to define inappropriate (criminal) behavior; perhaps, actually, it is the other way around.

We do comply with and endorse these systems of incarceration daily through our simple acceptance of our social control mechanisms. We do not question the behavior of police; we do not interrogate the activities and indiscretions of prison guards and officials; we allow punishment to continue, hidden, unknown, unimportant. Why? In part due to the objectification and classification of the criminal body. The "criminal" no longer lives as human once identified as criminal. Could recidivism be due to the systematic and widely accepted de-humanization of the criminal? Their bodies are compromised, their personalities and spirits and selves seen as degenerate. Hooton calls them lower animals, these "habitual criminals" who breed like cats or dogs or pigs.

Was criminal anthropology a process required in order to fully integrate the system of incarceration in prisons into the social understanding? Are prisons and a criminal class of property offenders necessary in order to maintain a fully functional capitalism? In examining the aspects of late stage capitalism, we can definitely notice that ridiculously high rates of incarceration (particularly in the case of young men of color) go along with the advancement of capitalism. Why? Less education and more incarceration mark late stage capitalism.

Perhaps I am being narrow minded, however; there has only been a short period of widely available education anyway. Maybe our very society has experienced some sort recidivistic transgression towards the middle ages... back to the norm, shall we say. Sigh. Oh well for high dreams of democracy. Feudal monarchy, here we come!