On the other hand (the one hand being discussing Agamben--earlier post), as far as prison in the U.S. is concerned, I definitely agree with you and would go even further: I think the U.S. treatment of imprisoned criminals itself, at best, borders on the criminal.
If our government is going to run things so that we have so many prisoners, then it has a responsibility to take care of them--the Constitution explicitly outlaws "cruel and unusual punishment" (8th Amend.) and explicitly states that people shall not be punished except through a trial for breaking the law (5th Amend.), and yet prisoners are routinely raped and killed by other prisoners:
1.) that's cruel and unusual punishment, and
2.) the rape and murder are neither punishments meted out by law nor assigned through a trial. It's not as if a prisoner has control over their environment--that's the whole point, namely, the prisoner is NOT in control of their environment--so, if they are raped or murdered, the responsibility rests on those who DO control the environment, namely the jailers (and, more importantly, those who determine the funding and administration of the prisons, namely the US lawmakers and administration). To be honest, I don't see how the present prison system is anything but unconstitutional (besides being simply inhuman and immoral)--and unconstitutional means breaking the law.

*5th Amend.: "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

*8th Amend.: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

See the following articles on prison rape:

'They Deserve It'
Dan Bell
The Nation posted June 21, 2006 (July 10, 2006 issue)

Prison's Shameful Secret
Silja J.A. Talvi
The Nation posted September 9, 2002 (web only)
{sexual slavery in prison}

{Collected articles from the Nation on US jails and prisons}


The American Prison Nightmare
By Jason DeParle
New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007

"America's prisons are dangerously overcrowded, unnecessarily violent, excessively reliant on physical segregation, breeding grounds of infectious disease, lacking in meaningful programs for inmates, and staffed by underpaid and undertrained guards in a culture that promotes abuse. What is more, prisoners' ability to legally challenge their living conditions has been curtailed by a congressional roadblock called the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints."

FUN FACT:

The man in charge of setting up Abu Ghraib (Lane McCotter) was under investigation by the DOJ at the time for abuses in a prison he oversaw in Utah:

"...the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-_base_d firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr. McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open Abu Ghraib. "I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's operation after that time," he said.


Source:
"Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S."
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
May 8, 2004 New York Times

I just found this video by Micheal Moore, apparently a segment he decided to cut from his documentary SICKO, because he didn't think people would believe it.
The video talks about the Norwegian prison (Bastoey) during the second half of the 8 min clip. And also mentions that Norway chose not to extradite a prisoner, citing the inhumane conditions of US prisons.

In Part Two, Section 4 “Vitae Necisque Potestas” of Homo Sacer, Agamben breaks down the latin phrase (life - kill (without blood) - authority?) and shows how life originally appeared in Roman law only as the correlate to the threat or authority to take it away.
This section is particularly relevant because it discusses the contradictory nature of bios/zoe: they’re included in their exclusion.
“Neither political bios nor natural zo, sacred life is the zone of
indistinction in which zoe annd bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other.” Pg 60
The US constitution recognized a right to zoe, but in order to assert bios (or participate in a political life) you nonetheless relinquish the right to zoe (or accept the authority of the sovereign over body). Of course you can choose not to participate in the bios sanctioned by the state, but then you run the risk of being incarcerated and reduced to zoe, mere life. Or you could be outlawed - killed, but not murdered.
I might be missing an aspect of the inclusion.

I'm always surprised by the attraction that people have for the victimology that the 'bare life' reference raises, it's always made me uncomfortable.

Over the years far to many philosophers and thinkers have raised Auschwitz to the status of a special event. But what happens if we say that it's not, accepting rather that it's just one genocide amongst many others. After all it's simply not historically correct that the 20th Century killed more people in genocidal actions than previous centuries. The big genocides in the Americas were over by the end of the 19th C, just as the big european colonial genocides were ending.

Either way if you remove the holocaust does it significantly change his work ?

The Holocaust, or Auschwitz specifically, can be analyzed in relation to other genocides and the meaning derived from that analyzes would certainly differ from that of Agamben's, but there are differences. The genocide in Rwanda that occurred in 1994 was comparatively quick, though estimates vary, up to a million people were killed in the course of a 100 days. And though the extermination of a group, the less that human status, and the state approval of these actions are shared, what is different in the Holocaust is specifically the CAMP - where people were kept alive by the state under a lawful status that was explicitly less than human. The genocide currently in Darfur for example force people to move to camps (which in Rwanda was in many cases churches) and these "refugee camps" in many ways resemble the bare life conditions ascribed by Agamben. Sudanese refugees in Kenya for example have to get permits to leave the camp, are not allowed to seek employment, and have little rights or protections. A similar case could be made for the conditions in which many Palestinians are currently living, where electricity and food supplies are provided by a global community, but are given or withheld by the Israeli government. And the internal and external displacement of Iraqi's since the US invasion, have raised similar questions of the conditions they face at home and abroad. Another example that I was struck with when reading Agamben was the condition under which black south africans were living during apartheid. Where the hue of your skin color (not simply black/white) determined the level of access you had to housing, work, citizenship, and even when and where you could move in the cities and towns.

Now, I don't think the bios/zoe distinction is necessary or useful in an analyzes of these similarities or differences. It seems unclear if whether limiting a persons movement is an action against their bare life or a reduction to it - rather it seems even an animal is protected from man more than a prisoner is.

So, here's my attempt to answer the question posed. If the holocaust was removed from his work, there would still have been a discourse, perpetuated by Schmidt, but also in science and law at the time, as well as a history of classification that would merit his investigation of LIFE and its history of _expression_ and management.

I was wondering if you would expand on the victimology that you mentioned in your post.