A Bipartisan Disaster

The measure of a civilization is how it treats its: (animals), (prisoners), (weakest members).

There are any number of variations on this/these quotations and none of them are attributable. Probably they all have their origin in the bible. Google Search says Matthew 25:41-46. (Where was that damned family bible when I needed it?)

At first blush, it might seem that Americans are at least doing pretty well by animals, but then one remembers that there is a lot more to the animal world than the Fido and Fluffy who we take to be groomed once a month. We prefer not to think about where our food comes from and the conditions under which it is raised, and we definitely don't want to know what goes on at the city pound.

It is not an unnatural transition from the pound to our prison system...or, in our god-blessed federal system, our 51 state and federal prison systems. Whenever I've allowed the reality of the new supermax prisons to percolate up into my consciousness, I have been appalled by the concept. But generally I've managed to avoid thinking about them. They worked their way back up into my awareness with the new discussions about closing Guantanamo. If it were closed tomorrow, it is certain that a number of the detainees (what a sanitary word) there would be transferred to one of the supermax sites.

No less a bleeding heart liberal than George Will recognizes:

...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.”

 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.

Now, in the May 4 issue of Mother Jones there is a long story by Shane Bauer, a journalist who along with two friends was hiking on the Irani / Iraqi border in 2009 when they were all arrested and imprisoned in Iran, where Bauer spent 26 months in prison, 4 of them in solitary confinement. The story is entitled "I Thought Solitary Confinement in Iran Was Bad -- Then I Went Inside America's Prisons." Now there is a comparison to make us all proud.

It is a long article and an appalling story that outlines, among other things, the inherent racism of the system, the unlimited power of prison officials and the joke of prisoners thinking they still have constitutional rights. It also addresses the increasing body of research that shows the negative, personality-destroying effects of solitary confinement for even relatively short periods.

Will writes of "protracted" solitary confinement, but that word doesn't do justice to what thousands of prisoners are undergoing: solitary confinement for 10, 20 and even 40 years in one Louisiana case.  An even worse aspect of this sorry story is that many, if not most, of the people in solitary are there on an indeterminate basis with no end date in sight. Only seventeen states told Bauer that they do not put people in solitary indeterminately.

If you can't get upset at the abuse of human beings, how about at the Orwellian misuse of the English language? According to Bauer, no state officially uses the term "solitary." Instead they have "single-celled segregation." And the official name of the California prison system is still the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation."