Yesterday I watched DUers justify and advocate for the torture of a living being. [View all]

[F4lconF16]

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Last edited Thu Apr 9, 2015, 05:06 PM - Edit history (1)

I cannot begin to express the pain that reading the threads about the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev brought me. Watching people I thought I knew a bit about, who I respected—often greatly—clamor for the punishment and suffering of another human was literally sickening. At one point I felt physically ill from of the vitriol and hate that was directed not just at Tsarnaev, but at fellow DUers. I made the decision last night to withdraw from any of the discussions, as I could not bear to watch anymore that night. Today, however, I am wading back in—and the filth is deep and thick.

I’m writing this in the hopes that maybe one or two people will see this and change their mind about the purposes of the prison system. At the very least, I hope that a few DUers may understand more about the horrors of solitary confinement.

First, however, I need to bring attention to some of what was said here yesterday. Before I begin my piece, I want to show just how bad it was. I think it is important to realize the depth of the sickness that is around here. I am ashamed to see these posts on what I thought was a compassionate, progressive board.

One other thing: I am in no way advocating for Tsarnaev. What he did was abominable, and breaks my heart. I am in no way excusing, justifying, or sympathizing with his actions. I and others were accused last night of not only wishing him well, but wanting him given things like swimming pools, field trips, massages, pancakes with smiley faces for breakfast every day, or even his freedom. We were told that the reason we are calling for humanity is because he is a pretty young boy and we think he’s cute. I won’t dignify that with a response.

Those of us who were advocating against supermax prisons and the psychological torture of inmates are doing so because we think there should be a baseline of compassion, of mercy, and of decency extended to each and every one of us. We believe that we find our greatest humanity when we can rise above the primitive notions of revenge and punishment. Our compassion is not for Tsarnaev, but for all living beings.

That said, here are a few of the comments, and why I find each one of them to be abhorrent:

Enjoyment of the suffering of others and hoping for pain:

“He was a murderous psycho....let me enjoy the rest of his life forgotten in a cell where he can grow old thinking about what he did to get there.”

I cannot identify with anyone who likes the suffering of another human being. It is a sign of sickness, of something seriously wrong with a person. I will never enjoy pain and suffering, no matter who it is inflicted on or for what reason.

“So, do the clamps go on the nipples or genitals? And how much juice should be used? He is fortunate to be in the hands of the BoP. A father wouldn't be so understanding or concerned. Fuck him.”

I will note that a jury hid this post—however, I included it as an example of the sadism of what many people have been thinking during this process.

“No. He needs to live a long life behind bars. Suffering every day of his miserable life. These nuts crave death. They have death wishes. Death is too good for him. He could live another 70 years. He will be in fear for his life every day in prison, probably isolated from the rest of the population. I wish him bloody diarrhea, torturous mental illness, and any painful disease he could possibly ever contract.”

Running out of things to say. Yet another example of the disgustingly specific sadistic fantasies.

Advocating for ignoring the judicial process and the law, for death:

“Hope they don't waste time on appeals. His guilt is not in question and never was. A swift lethal injection is needed.”

I will never agree that our legal process should be suspended—ever. What little value there is in our current justice system is found in the fact that we theoretically are all treated equally under the law. To want to remove that process and just kill him reduces us to the level of cops that simply shoot people they think need to die.

Stating that any suffering we might inflict is okay:

“He deserves anything that happens to him.”

Anything covers a whole lot. No human being deserves what is done in some of these prisons.

“As I said on another thread, as far as I'm concerned, so long as he never knows another moment of freedom, I don't care what happens to him.”

Same as above. You should care. For every person we torture, we as a society grow sicker.

Specifically wishing for psychological harm of another being:

“He worshipped his brother. He should be reminded a lot about his brother about how much he cared about him. F him.”

Reminding someone of how much they cared for someone who is now dead is emotional abuse. If I saw that in a relationship, I would be worried as hell for that person.

“Life will be even more of a punishment for this animal. I hope he has nightmares every night.”

I don’t. I have no interest in relegating someone to psychological and mental breakdown.

“However, they should get a collection of the mangled body parts of those people they killed and maimed, put them in formaldehyde and have them in his cell so he clearly remembers why he is in there.”

This is depraved. I hope I don’t need to say more. I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

Abandonment of morals for the purpose of revenge:

“I'm not a DP proponent, but I don't care if he gets it.”

“I chose life without parole because I oppose the death penalty but I won't shed any tears if he is executed.”

Both of the above bother me a lot. It hurts me when we execute people. The death penalty is wrong, full stop. I will never be okay with it—no matter what the person did, or how much they deserve it.

Advocating torture through false dilemma fallacies:

“It might be torture but whats your suggestion Holiday Inn”

Pretending that there is nothing else we can do, that somehow we can’t imprison someone without torturing them is pretty messed up. Please, don’t hide it behind “well there’s no other options”—just come out and say it: you’d like him in pain.

Advocating torture through the fallacy of relative privation:

“The "torture" that murderer has to endure for the rest of his miserable life doesn't even come close to the real torture those poor parents have to face the rest of their lives.”

Yes, his pain is not the same type of pain or anywhere near the level of pain that those parents had and have to endure. I truly feel for the people he harmed, but their pain does not justify his pain. It is not acceptable as a society to torture someone. And here I thought that we figured that out during the Bush years. Sad how the people that called him out find this acceptable.

It’s too hard to not torture people:

“I'm sorry, but how much juggling would be required to make life in prison NOT "torture"?”

I don’t really give a flying fuck how much effort it takes—it is not acceptable to torture someone because we’re too lazy or unmotivated to find out a better solution.

When it’s a bad person, it’s not torture:

“To call it torture is to underestimate just how dangerous those kind of people really are.”

The degree of crime has no bearing on what torture is. It is torture done to them or anyone else.

If he didn’t want to be tortured, he shouldn’t have done it:

“The answer seems to be, don't engage in behaviors that would lead the folks deciding such matters to think that not only do you need to be incarcerated, but you are a threat to other inmates.”

This is perhaps the only comment I found that I understood. I disagree with it, but I understand it. Unfortunately, many people subjected to the torture of solitary confinement should not be there. Markpkessinger said it better than I could have:

"The problem with people who say “I don’t care what happens to {fill in the blank} is that, invariably, we are talking about more than one case or one individual. And regardless of how heinous that one individual's actions may have been, invariably, some not-so-heinous criminals get caught up in it, too. The article mentions one Jack Powers, imprisoned for burglary as a kid, released in 1982. then married and started two businesses, both of which were bankrupt by the end of the decade. He began robbing banks -- BUT WAS NEVER ARMED, he merely passed notes to the teller demanding money. IN prison, a friend of his was murdered by the Aryan Brotherhood. Powers cooperated with prosecutors, believing he could cut a deal to get out of prison earlier, but then had to be placed in protective custody. When he got wind that prison officials were planning on transferring him to the general population, which would have put him at risk for being killed for his role in the convictions of four members of the Aryan Brotherhood, he escaped. So he wound up getting sent to ADX because he was deemed a flight risk, never mind that he was fleeing for his life.

When we talk about the criminal justice and penal systems, the conditions in prisons or the death penalty, it is important to remember that we are NEVER talking about just a single, individual case, and that invariably, people who do not remotely deserve to be kept under such brutal conditions inevitably will be. Any moral or ethical approach to these issues MUST factor in not only the 'easy' cases involving notorious, brutal criminals, but the harder cases, which often involve less violent, or even non-violent such as Powers, prisoners who will inevitably get swept up into the system.”

But enough with those.

To begin the real focus of this post, I would like to explain why I think that compassion towards all living beings is not only important, but necessary for a continuation of a humanitarian society and further development of our morality and understanding of each other. Compassion means that we hold a respect for other beings. It means that we empathize with them. It means that we behave with a minimum of decency towards others around us. It means that even under the most dire of circumstances and in the hardest of times, despite personal challenges or feelings, we will do our best to continue to hold that respect in our actions and words.

Respect in this case does not imply that we respect another’s actions; instead, it means that we view them as something more than an inanimate object. I treat a dog differently than I would a rock. I do so because I firmly believe that the dog, unlike the rock, experiences the world. It is a fellow traveler in this temporary world of life; something that lives, breathes, understands.

Those living beings are deserving of my respect because they have just as much inherent value in the universe as I do. I am but a different type of being. As an atheist, I also see no evidence for a life other than the one I am lucky enough to have. Life is the most incredibly precious thing that exists, for me. We are here, and we are gone, and we have but a quick moment to experience the beauty of the world around us. If I deny the respect I hold for life to another living being, I diminish my own.

The Buddhist perspective is that everyone exists with some amount of basic goodness. That is not an easy view to reconcile with the horrifying things that happen in this world. But I take that perspective anyways, because I think to do otherwise denies my own humanity. If I cannot see the inherent good in psychopaths and murderers, I cannot respect them. If I do not respect them, I do not respect the value of my own life. I see those people as sick; there is no way a sane, healthy mind exists within them. With luck, future medical advances may help us to help them. But for now, I must see their humanity in order to avoid denying my own.

This is why I am so hurt by the denials of humanity that were posted here and continue to be posted here. I see people denying my own humanity when they advocate for what amounts to the torture of a living being. I see denials of my own humanity in our society’s actions. I am pained that that is being taken from me.

Supermax prisons use the idea of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation to induce confusion and terror in their inmates. Those tactics are simply inhumane. I would proceed to go into just why they are so horrible, but as evidenced by my thread yesterday, people will refuse to believe me, or feign ignorance, or pretend things really aren’t that bad. So I’m going to just quote a few sources, as they speak for themselves.

http://ccrjustice.org/solitary-factsheet

“Today, tens of thousands of individuals across the country are detained inside cramped, concrete, windowless cells in a state of near-total solitude for between 22 and 24 hours a day. The cells have a toilet and a shower, and a slot in the door large enough for a guard to slip a food tray through. Prisoners in solitary confinement are frequently deprived of telephone calls and contact visits. “Recreation” involves being taken, often in handcuffs and shackles, to another solitary cell where prisoners can pace alone for an hour before being returned to their cell.

Ever since solitary confinement came into existence, it has been used as a tool of repression. While it is justified by corrections officials as necessary to protect prisoners and guards from violent superpredators, all too often it is imposed on individuals, particularly prisoners of color, who threaten prison administrations in an altogether different way. Consistently, jailhouse lawyers and jailhouse doctors, who administer to the needs of their fellow prisoners behind bars, are placed in solitary confinement. They are joined by political prisoners from various civil rights and independence movements.”

Solitary Confinement is Torture

“The devastating psychological and physical effects of prolonged solitary confinement are well documented by social scientists: prolonged solitary confinement causes prisoners significant mental harm and places them at grave risk of even more devastating future psychological harm.

Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of impending nervous breakdowns. Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal ideation.”

More at the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html?_r=0

“According to David Cloud, a senior associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to the reform of the criminal-justice system, “The research is pretty conclusive: Since people started looking at this, even 200 years ago, when a guy named Francis Gray studied 4,000 people in ‘silent prisons,’ the studies have found that the conditions themselves can cause mental illness, stress, trauma.” The devastating effects of solitary confinement, even on those who showed no previous signs of psychological problems, are now so broadly accepted by mental-health professionals that policy makers are finally taking notice. Last year the New York State attorney general approved a deal forbidding the placement of minors and mentally ill prisoners in solitary; in January, New York City banned solitary for anyone under 21. Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado signed a similar bill at the urging of the state corrections chief, Rick Raemisch, who spent a night in solitary confinement and wrote about it in a New York Times Op-Ed, concluding that its overuse is “counterproductive and inhumane.” As Cloud told me, “Even if you tried to employ solitary confinement with the most humane intentions, people are still going to lose their minds and hurt themselves.”

...snip...

He enlisted Dr. Doris Gundersen, a Denver-based forensic psychiatrist, who was allowed inside the ADX as part of his legal team. After evaluating 45 prisoners, she estimated that 70 percent met the criteria for at least one serious mental illness. She and Aro spoke to inmates who swallowed razor blades, inmates who were left for days or weeks shackled to their beds (where they were routinely allowed to soil themselves), an inmate who ate his own feces so regularly that staff psychiatrists made a special note only when he did so with unusual “voracity.” A number of prisoners were taken off prescribed medications. (Until recently prison regulations forbade the placement of inmates on psychotropic medication in the Control Unit, the most restrictive section of the ADX, as, by definition, such medication implies severe mental illness.) Others claimed that they were denied treatment, aside from “therapy classes” on the prison television’s educational station and workbooks with titles like “Cage Your Rage,” despite repeated written requests. (The ADX lawsuit says that only two psychologists and one part-time psychiatrist serve the entire prison.)

...snip...

Over the next decade, Powers, by any rational accounting, lost his mind. He cut off both earlobes, chewed off a finger, sliced through his Achilles’ tendon, pushed staples into his face and forehead, swallowed a toothbrush and then tried to cut open his abdomen to retrieve it and injected what he considered “a pretty fair amount of bacteria-laden fluid” into his brain cavity after smashing a hole in his forehead. In 2005, after slicing open his scrotum and removing a testicle, Powers was sent to the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo., for treatment, where a psychiatrist determined he was “not in need of inpatient psychiatric treatment or psychotropic medication” and that his behavior “was secondary to his antisocial disorder.” When he was returned to Springfield four years later, after slashing his wrists and writing “American Gulag” in blood on his bedsheets, the doctor wrote, “Considerations that (Powers) has some form of psychosis, thought disorder or mental illness are unfounded.”

...snip...

On the morning of May 1, 2010, Vega was found dead in his cell. He had hanged himself with a bedsheet. After Vega’s death, Powers shaved his head and began decorating his body with what he would describe as his “Avatar stripes,” a reference to the striped blue aliens in the James Cameron movie. Using a razor blade to make tiny cuts in his skin and then rubbing carbon-paper dust into the wounds, Powers tattooed spiky black slashes along his arms, legs, neck, skull, under his eyes and around his Adam’s apple. A photograph from 2011 presents an astounding transformation: The smirking, shaggy-haired young bank robber who entered the federal prison system in 1990 no longer existed, and the man who replaced him looked like something out of a nightmare.”

Much more at the link.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole

“And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

...snip...

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

...snip...

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

...snip...

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.”

Much more at the link. One of the best articles I’ve read on this. If you support supermax detention facilities at the moment, read this.

From our right wing conservative justice Anthony Kennedy:

“Kennedy, traditionally considered the swing vote among the current set of justices, recalled a recent case before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the defendant had been in solitary confinement for 25 years, and “lost his mind.”

“Solitary confinement literally drives men mad,” he said. He pointed out that European countries group difficult prisoners in cells of three or four where they have human contact, which “seems to work much better.” He added that “we haven’t given nearly the study, nearly enough thought, nearly enough investigative resources to looking at our correction system.”

Kennedy’s comments come just weeks after a federal review of U.S. solitary confinement policy also found that the United States holds more inmates in solitary confinement than any other developed nation. Confinement typically involves isolation in an often windowless cell with a steel door for 23 hours a day, with almost no human contact. The treatment has been found to have a psychological impact in as many as a few days, though, as Justice Kennedy pointed out, many are held for decades. In the wake of the new report, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) called upon the Federal Bureau of Prisons to alter its practices.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/my-night-in-solitary.html

“First thing you notice is that it’s anything but quiet. You’re immersed in a drone of garbled noise — other inmates’ blaring TVs, distant conversations, shouted arguments. I couldn’t make sense of any of it, and was left feeling twitchy and paranoid. I kept waiting for the lights to turn off, to signal the end of the day. But the lights did not shut off. I began to count the small holes carved in the walls. Tiny grooves made by inmates who’d chipped away at the cell as the cell chipped away at them.

For a sound mind, those are daunting circumstances. But every prison in America has become a dumping ground for the mentally ill, and often the “worst of the worst” — some of society’s most unsound minds — are dumped in Ad Seg.

...snip...

Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and expert on confinement, described in a paper published last year the many psychological effects of solitary. Inmates reported nightmares, heart palpitations and “fear of impending nervous breakdowns.” He pointed to research from the 1980s that found that a third of those studied had experienced “paranoia, aggressive fantasies, and impulse control problems ... In almost all instances the prisoners had not previously experienced any of these psychiatric reactions.”

...snip...

Eventually, I broke a promise to myself and asked an officer what time it was. 11:10 a.m. I felt as if I’d been there for days. I sat with my mind. How long would it take before Ad Seg chipped that away? I don’t know, but I’m confident that it would be a battle I would lose.”

More at the link.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/solitary-confinement-psychological-effects-sarah-shourd

“Scientific studies have shown that it can take less than two days in solitary confinement for brainwaves to shift towards delirium or stupor (pdf). For this reason, the United Nations has called on all countries to ban solitary confinement – except in exceptional circumstances, and even then to impose a limit of no longer than 15 days so that any permanent psychological damage can be averted. Shourd spent a total of 410 days in solitary and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after her release. She still has trouble sleeping. But since returning home, she has spent much of her time trying to draw attention to the plight of more than 80,000 Americans who are held in isolation on any given day, some of whom do not count their stay in days or months, but in years and even decades.

Solitary confinement fell out of favor in American prisons for much of the last century, until a building boom of Supermax or control-unit prisons began in the early 1990’s. You know, when being “tough on crime” was all the rage. It still is; being “smart on crime” still isn’t. By 2005, 40 states were operating Supermax facilities, the physical design of which served to severely isolate prisoners both from the outside world and from their fellow inmates. Despite the extreme harshness of life in these prisons, where inmates are often held in tiny, windowless cells with limited or no access to the outdoors, the average stays far exceeds the UN’s recommended 15-day maximum.

Shourd told me that after two months of next to no human contact in her solitary cell, her mind began to slip. One of the biggest problems with solitary confinement, she said, is that it’s completely the opposite of the point of prison: giving inmates the chance to improve themselves.

“You want to be productive, to use your time well, but you can’t when your brain is being assaulted with mental deprivation. I would spend all day reading the same paragraph over and over again, unable to understand it – and end up throwing the book at the wall.”

She had to go on hunger strike for five days before she was finally allowed to visit her fellow hostages, blindfolded in a padded interrogation room. Eventually, however, Shourd was allowed to have brief but daily contact visits with her two friends. This slightly more normal human interaction kept her from slipping into total, and possibly irretrievable, decline.”

And more, and more, and more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confinement-shane-bauer

http://solitarywatch.com/2014/12/05/un-committee-against-torture-says-u-s-must-reform-its-use-of-solitary-confinement/

http://antitorture.org/new-solitary-confinement/

http://www.insidescience.org/content/solitary-confinement-form-torture/1569

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/solitary-confinement-torture

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/29/amir.fakhravar.iran.torture/

http://io9.com/why-solitary-confinement-is-the-worst-kind-of-psycholog-1598543595

...

THIS IS NOT OPINION. THIS IS SCIENTIFIC, MEDICAL FACT. SOLITARY CONFIMENT IS TORTURE.

...

There is no excuse to support this. Period. The evidence is overwhelming, and, as someone posted in another thread, it is on par with denying global warming. And I’d say that’s true—except that in this case, you are denying the intimate destruction and abuse of a living being. And if after all this, you still support it?

Fuck you. I have no words for what I think of you.

There is more to discuss, however. There is still the issue of using prisons as tools for punishment and revenge, instead of rehabilitation and the protection of society. That we still in this day and age focus on punishing people is sadistic. We have a need as a society to inflict pain on people for what they did to others—and that is a brutal way to live. An eye leaves the whole world blind. Our society cannot claim to be a just, moral society and yet continue to view the prison system in the way we do now.

I will start with an excellent post from lapislzi:

“You could argue that in many cases, true justice is impossible. The dead cannot be brought back to life, the burned building cannot be resurrected in any meaningful way, the despoiled cannot be unraped. That's a fact of life. So, what can we, as compassionate human beings, do for the cause of justice in an unjust world?

Meting out punishment in measure is a poor substitute. It solves nothing and does nothing to advance the cause of justice. You can only kill the murderer once, and it demoralizes society to do it at all. Is that who we want to be as a people? Punishers and vengeance-seekers? Does that ennoble anyone, or just put the judge and the jury on the same level with the miscreant

I cannot get behind killing killers any more than I can get behind any other barbaric forms of revenge and punishment.”

Jail cannot be a method by which society punishes people. It must be meant to rehabilitate first and foremost. There is a critical difference between punishment and restraint. Restraint is how we teach children (or should)—many, many studies have shown that the more harshly children are punished, the more violent they become. When we do it on a massive scale as a society, we reap those same results on a massive scale. The only purpose that a prison can have is to establish a new pattern of non-violent behavior while simultaneously restraining inmates from effecting more harm on the population.

Sweden’s system realizes this, which is why it is one of the most effective systems in the world. They are literally closing prisons because they don’t have enough people coming back into them. Rehabilitation reduces prison violence, reduces recidivism, helps people to re-enter society with a support system, teaches them social and work skills, saves huge amounts of money, and is, above all, the humane way to treat people. We must treat prisoners with the same amount of respect we expect them to show when they return to society.

Anyways, I’m about done. I was going to write a fair bit more on restraint vs. punishment and the purpose of our system, but I need to go eat lunch, and I'm kinda burnt. Hopefully people will actually read this entire post, though I sincerely doubt it. $20 says that half the people just respond angrily at me for calling them torture supporters. Ah well, this made me feel better after the shit-show that was yesterday, anyways.

(By the way, went through some readings from the Dalai Lama to help write this, and that is a man who I have more respect for than almost anyone else. Wow.)