Punishment and Profit: Alienation, Anomie, and the Criminal Justice Apparatus.

Punishment and the law it represents are considered to be sacred in the US. Current understandings of punishment rely on traditional notions of benevolent paternalism which has come to represent hegemonic ideology. By using privatization as a launching point, this paper is meant to address punishment in the United States as a profit-making system. By viewing alienation and anomie as foundation for the existence of the criminal justice apparatus this work is meant to challenge boundaries used by many scholars as ways to understand the growth of the prison industrial complex. By beginning our understanding of punishment at the end of feudalism and serfdom, this paper highlights that at each state in its grotesque development, the criminal justice system has never truly been about justice; but instead a way to exploit labor, create anomie and alienation, while embodying the logic of capital. This has resulted in a monstrous machine presenting itself as sanctified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]