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Have we become a barbaric nation? Where the mentally ill are left to languish in prisons because we don’t provide the treatment they deserve? Where prisoners are put in solitary confinement, which leads to mental illness, because housing prisoners that way is effective? Is effectiveness now the yardstick for everything?
Have we become a nation where human rights are denied the incarcerated and the mentally ill? And we just lock them away and pretend they don’t exist?
Torture has become a debate topic. Barbaric treatment is endorsed by some with the excuse that "it works" – without regard for the humanity of those tortured by barbaric means.
All of this is interrelated. We’ve outsourced penal systems to private enterprises: Businesses, that sell shares to investors and likely have lobbyists. Lobbyists to feed the insatiable super max beasts via longer prison terms and harsher treatment.
Why do we spend so much money housing prisoners and so little treating the mentally ill?
If it’s effectiveness we’re using as a yardstick, then let’s look at the effectiveness of treatment. Let’s look at humane treatment. For both prisoners and mental illness. Let’s consider humane treatment of those we’ve imprisoned in Guantanamo, those tortured on our watch and still terrorized by goon squads. But also shine a light on similar mistreatment of citizens detained right here behind prisons walls.
Can we not realize that humane treatment is for all? That no matter what crimes people may have committed, it is wrong to endorse ill treatment. Especially by private corporations, which sell shares to investors and pay lobbyists to urge legislators to write bills demanding longer, harsher sentences.
Torture is wrong. But so is harsh treatment of criminals and mentally ill people.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
Article 10
1. All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.
3. The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.
Could we please, at the very least, abide by international standards?
Or have we become a barbaric nation?
15 Comments
Jim Webb has introduced a bill to reform criminal justice.
Glenn Greenwald wrote about that in March.
Not become..always were..it just was hidden from view before the internet allowed the truth to begin to be exposed. Remember Attica in 1971? That was a protest against prison conditions. The Torture Inc. documentary covered the abuse of US prisoners. Privatization is wrong on many levels, but the abuse of inmates was occuring long before. The mentally ill are also executed in the US.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..r_embedded
Thanks TheraP. Recommeneded.
An attempt to prove water boarding isn’t torture failed. Video is there. All torture apologists should have to experience it.
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” Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself water boarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture.
It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly — “Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop,” according to NBC Chicago. “
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/…..erboarded/
I wish that all those who want to deny torture had to undergo it in order to be allowed to deny it. That would silence all critics!
as usual therap, an incredible read, by the way, I’ve been linking to your strauss page often, that is one of the most informative pieces I’ve read on the principles behind the maniacs in the pnac
as far as this article, ya, we should never ever privitize the penal system, that makes for incarcertion for profit
Before we, as a society and a people can do these things, any or all of these things, we have first had to lay waste our own humanity … and much of our sanity.
This insidious descent has been long, slow and, for all human intents and purposes, unchecked by either reason or rational consideration.
Our embrace of expediency or “effectiveness” at the behest of unbridled greed and avarice has been matched by an infatuation with short-term thinking and deliberate and willful neglect of both the social contract and the effect of pushing the ‘cost’ off onto generations too young to have any say in the matter, as if both were “business as usual”.
It is not “usual” and it is a nasty, careless “business” that we have chosen to “believe” is normal.
On the one hand our children are encouraged to play video games in which violence is ubiquitous, extreme and hardly, by any definition, “healthy”. It is not little fuzzy circles which some cartoonish jaws are directed to gobble up, but as lifelike and real a representation of people, however ostensibly “different”, which our children are encouraged to destroy, most violently and viciously … readying those children to easily sit at a flickering screen and destroy real human beings many miles away. On the other, sociopaths in the highest political offices and business suites of the nation toy with the lives of millions as a matter of course, and the public, uniformed and too busy to think, imagine that they have a say in the ‘choices’ which determine the nature and quality of their lives … which they, most emphatically do not.
Forty some years ago a sign appeared on a bridge across the Charles River, between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. It read, “If voting could change anything, if it could actually make a difference, it would be illegal.”
For more than sixty years, the “utility” of conquest, the domination of the world has been the dream of America’s ruling classes. The Super Wealthy (the “haves and “have-mores”, the preferred “base” of George W. Bush) and the Political Class, have sought to control everyone and everything. Our nation’s wholesale embrace of torture the past years, while different, if we are to be honest, only in scale, has come, increasingly, to define us, that is, who and what we appear to be in the eyes of the rest of the world.
We have chosen to look away from what has been defining us at ‘home’.
When Reagan turned the mentally ill out into the streets, he was praised for his foresight and realistic grasp of the role of government, and “tough love” became the hardened attitude of the land. When prisons became the repository of the young, mostly poor, dark-skinned and friendless in “high places” a draconian, endless “War on Drugs” was launched. It was a trial-balloon for the current endless “War on Terror” and presaged the deliberate dehumanization of the “other”, which has been the favored method of “initial assault” ever since.
The claim of the current Drug Czar, that it is a “war against a product” is complete and total nonsense, as even a moment’s consideration would suggest.
That prisons, far too often, are warehouses of abuse and degradation is beyond reasonable and rational dispute.
Most Americans understand this and many are not simply undismayed, they positively endorse this reality, believing that anyone put into prison deserves whatever may befall them …
The same is true, and even more so, as regards those who we accept as evil, hateful, monstrous “terrorists”. For we have been taught to hate and fear and loathe them, to consider them so far beneath ourselves as to deserve to be held, whatever their true guilt or innocence, forever in a limbo of a status beneath that of a rabid dog or perhaps in the status of those we once considered fit to be but hewers of wood and drawers of water, the children of Ham, the slave caste, the untouchables.
It is not the humanity of our victims which is on the line.
It is our own.
What a wonderful comment! It could be a blog of its own. It ennobles this thread. And I thank you. You write so well. Your words are so true. I too see it exactly as you paint it. It’s been very, very troubling to see all this happen to our society – from our society. We’ve done it to the world and to ourselves.
I like your substitution of “expediency” – that works even better for what they’ve been after in place of the social contract. (My use of effective came from the so-called torture debate.)
What a tragic truth that is! Tragic. Truth.
Terrorists have been defined as sub-human. But so too illegal immigrants. And both locked away. And treated like dirt.
We have so much to answer for!
Yes. Absolutely!
I cannot thank you enough for that eloquent description of our current tragic predicament.
I’m glad you found that strauss blog helpful. I too have found those ideas so useful over and over.
(Also the Erikson stages as applied to the wider society. I’ve used the positives and the negatives to help me understand many things.)
But the straussian “building blocks” have been a breakthrough for me! So many disparate things now make sense. All the wars, big and small. The huge focus on defense budgets. The maligning of anyone who seeks peace. The lies. It was, for me, like a turning on a light in a dark room where I kept bumping into furniture. And suddenly seeing the layout!
Glad it’s coming in handy for you too. I truly think it was the culmination of a long search – in that dark room.
Webb’s efforts in VA wrt prison reform are laudable. His position on Gitmo and indefinite detention, not so much.
Thanks for the post.
Thanks for that clarification! It’s a sad thing when people believe that atrocities are permissible – if people are assumed to be bad guys of another culture. Can they not see the difference between a legal system for citizens (however flawed) and no legal system at all?
Maybe 2 or 3 times of each torture technique that was used just to make sure the lesson is learned?
Have you read this?
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THE BRUSSELLS TRIBUNAL
Questioning the New Imperial World Order
A Hearing on the
“Project for the New American Century”
14-17 April 2004
http://www.brusselstribunal.or…..ibunal.htm
more then helpful theraP, far more, it adds to every argument I’ve had with internet at hand, I show that and even wing nuts eyes go round
theraP, you might consider cross posting that here, it will get you more action on that page and if the fdl editors see it here they might front page it at the mother ship, if so it will get tons of action, I would love knowing rachael and ko’s staff had that in their arsenol and if posted at mother ship they will have it in their arsenol
I have not seen that yet blue, will take a look today, thanx for the link and all you do