The excluded of consumer society: drug addicts, psychopaths and the homeless in American prisons

Abstract

The disregard of public health services towards drug addicts, the mentally ill and the homeless in the United States implies that every year there are more of them behind bars. Prison serves as a repository of the human waste of a society, one that is increasingly subject to the dictatorship of the market. Their fate provides tragic experimental verification of the hypothesis that there is a functional and causal link between the impoverishment of the welfare state and the prosperity of the penal state.