Tweet
I wasn’t going to do this. I really wasn’t. In the first of what looks like, in spite of myself, will be some kind of series, I expressed my admiration for Marion in Savannah, who is able to read New York Times Op-Eds every single day. I could not do that: It’s true that she has to have all three of coffee, tea and hot chocolate afterwards to recover, but not even single malt would work for me.
However, I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and so am precluded from actual intellectual activity like, say, reading a paper in Italian on why Hope was left in Pandora’s jar in the original version of the myth. Besides, the Barbarian himself thanked the second entry for reading WaPo so other FDLers wouldn’t have to. How can I turn up my nose after that?
Today Liberal #2, whom we met discussing the Pope in the first entry, writes on the Republicans vis-a-vis the sequester; Mideast Desk (David Ignatius) discusses relations with Russia; and Entitlement Reformer (Fred Hiatt) waxes on those with Japan, whether or not eloquently I couldn’t say. For I’m not going to read these, much less summarize them for you today. You have the links if any sounds interesting.
But today we also have Baseball Fan (George F. Will) taking a prison break. It is a break from his usual mixture of hot-button conservative demands like abolishing the minimum wage and populist calls to abolish the big banks. It is also a break from his June, 2008 position on prisons, namely, the greater the incarceration rate, the lesser the crime. Instead, today BF inveighs against solitary confinement. Never mind water-boarding at Guantanamo, he says at the outset, for meanwhile,
tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
He goes on from there to cite Sen. Richard Durbin’s (D-Il) initiative on the subject (not telling us, to be sure, that this was eight months ago). He cites facts like that the U. S. only has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. He notes New Yorker and NYT articles on the damage to the prisoner psyche of the Supermax facilities such as Marion, Il. He even quotes from the journal of one Charles Dickens, who came from across the pond in 1842 to visit a prison known for solitary confinement.
Finally, BF says, mass incarceration costs too much, and we’re paying just to make psychotics out of people who will eventually get back on our streets.
Great stuff, right? Except that BF has no clue on why all this is going on even after it has been discredited (since he is hardly the first to point out the problems; so have the Center for Constitutional Rights in a recent FDL post, and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in an earlier offering, among others). Namely, it is in at least some measure the result of extensive lobbying by the Corrections Corporation of America for stricter criminal laws and against more lenient parole conditions, in order to increase its bottom line. Indeed, in a more cynical moment I might think our columnist was a stalking horse for the CCA. “You say your prisons cost too much? We can show you how to save by turning them over to experts for a small fee.”
But probably not. Baseball Fan is a strange duck. Best to leave it at that.
4 Comments
Will’s got the idea that he and his kids are going to have slaves after it all goes down. And they can hire overseers so they don’t have to get their hands dirty.
And they’ll have drones.
And they’ll all drive around in their SUVs till the end of the world.
And nobody will know that they’re lying to themselves, first, before they lie to everybody else.
(And nobody will figure out in time that they’re all damn fools voting for Republicans.)
I much enjoy your selective offerings, E. F. Beall; thank you! One comment I have on B.F.’s opinion piece has to do with his opening paragraph:
“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
If I may dissect this, I find it a classic example of framing. And I wonder if the entire piece might not have been written in order to ‘truthify’ the opening two sentences. I would submit that the debate ‘reignited’ is not about whether the waterboarding was torture – the waterboarding was torture. Also, it is by no means clear that his claim for ‘only three suspects’ is either verifiable or even trustworthy should the claim be made.
Axioms and postulates are what Euclid’s geometry is based upon – we have to accept that ‘a point is that which has no parts’ and on we go. Solitary confinement as torture and the bloated system in general, unlike Euclid’s geometry, doesn’t depend in its truthfulness on BF’s opening sentences, much as he may wish us to believe it does.
Journalism at its best, not. But I don’t think you disagree, and thanks very much for linking to this. The Washington Post has seen far, far better days.
As a separate issue, I much recommend Alan Paton’s autobiographical account of the reforms he instituted in a prison for black youth under apartheid’s earlier than Mandela brutal regime – “Towards the Mountain.” It is very sad this should have become an apt comparison in this country today. With the additional twist you point out, that privatization is simply another word for vampire squid securitization, one scambubble after another. The new normal.
I’m not as kind as you, though. I think BF knows this part of the pajama game very very well.
I’ve been away for several hours, and I don’t know when your comments were really written (I find that the times FDL puts in bylines are generally crazy; the time for my posts has been appearing as if I were writing in Denver rather than Washington), but thanks to TuffsNotEnuff and juliania.
Especially, juliania, thanks for your insight about the first paragraph and “framing” (I noticed his mistake about what the debate actually was, but saw it as peripheral, maybe wrongly).