People and Productivity

The first time I heard the phrase, I was probably in the womb, my Mother probably watching the latest criminal justice sensation story on TV. That's how immanent the concept seems to me anyway.

It is one of those phrases that slips continuously into social consciousness, an unconscious mechanism in liberal-democratic societies (a-la-Borat, read repressed) that controls widespread social panic , euphemistically addressing a society's carefully hidden doppelganger--the antisocial.

Nevertheless, it took me years of incarceration, of crossing into the forbidden territory itself, to come to a full understanding of its meaning-in-use.

It usually comes as a great rhetorical flourish ending an inspiring speech made by someone in authority. To these people, it is the last word par excellence--the essential message to the enemy, the basic Gospel to the benighted heathen, the critical freedom message of Voice of America. It is to them like the musical flourish--a twitter really--to the Baroque Symphony; like celebratory gunfire to sub-national third-world militias; like the Aaronic Benediction to the Catholic Mass.

"...so that they might become productive members of society."

There it is in all of its anti-antisocial beauty. If I could I'd embark on a great etymological dig to uncover the first use of this blessed phrase, and its first benevolent application to the benighted criminal. Like Foucault, I would excavate the historical record and find where it all began, where the public mind initially contracted its peculiar viral strain.

There is no doubt some great mystery about the whole of human society hidden in that archaeological record---a deep and all-pervasive essence that has contributed a part to the very fabric of the contemporary social system.

Reducing the role of criminal rehabilitation to social productivity reveals, apart from an all-pervasive capitalist thought-world, the cynical nature of of the current correctional regime. A productive member of society, in this view, and which is borne out by reality, can be a subsistence wage earner who never finished high school, and lives the entirety of his life in a disorganized, disadvantaged community. This is a legitimately productive rehabilitated criminal in the system's view. Productivity, thus, is exposed as a euphemism for benign underclass.

Nevermind that subsistence wages, lack of education, and underclass status are all leading factors in criminality. That's clearly not important--what's important is reducing crime!

Incredibly, the authorities do not see the connection, nor the contradiction here...

More on this later.