Institutionalized torture
by digby
George Will makes a good point:
“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.”
Noting that half of all prison suicides are committed by prisoners held in isolation, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has prompted an independent assessment of solitary confinement in federal prisons. State prisons are equally vulnerable to Eighth Amendment challenges concerning whether inmates are subjected to “substantial risk of serious harm.”
America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.
Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.
This is shameful and despicable and we should all be more mindful and attentive to what is going on in America's prison industrial complex. I am as guilty as the next person of ignoring it far too often.
I must point out, however, that one of the legal distinctions between the torture of terrorism suspects or tasering of average citizens by police, is the fact that they have been offered no due process and have been found guilty of nothing. Of course, we can make another legal distinction between the torture of terrorism suspects and those in prison: the constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. (On the other hand the 4th amendment does guarantee due process, so inflicting pain on innocents in custody would seem to be doubly unconstitutional.)
In any case, this isn't really complicated and doesn't require any fancy legal arguments. There is no moral distinction among any of those circumstances. Torture is always wrong whether the person has been found guilty of a crime or not. It's barbaric that we do it so often in our society. But then we are very exceptional.
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