Remember The Bastille

October 9th, 2007

I wonder if any of these torturing US prison guards have ever considered the eventuality that one day all the prisoners they have abused will be free. What do they think will happen then? Do they think their victim’lll shake hands, laugh ruefully and agree it was all in good sport?

From Jill at Feministe:

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. �Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.�

If a prisoner doesn�t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There�s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can�t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.

Jill’s post brings together many disparate aspects of the prison/industrial complex to give a chilling picture of what awaits those criminal, stupid or unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the justice system under Bush.

Something about which I’ve blogged a lot is the tendency for pyschopaths to drift towards the military, mercenary, police and correctional industries and especially the privatised prisons, both in the UK and US, as a venue in which they can indulge their most shameful dreams of power and abuse upon a literally captive population.

Punishment is not only a crucial and ever-larger state function, it is also big business. Private ownership and/or operation of prisons, while an increasingly significant part of the corrections system, represents only a fraction of the “prison-industrial complex.” The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year. This figure does not address existing overcrowding, which is pandemic from city jails to federal prisons. The public sector imprisonment industry employs more than 50,000 guards, as well as additional tens of thousands of administrators, and health, education, and food service providers. Especially in rural communities where other employment is scarce, corrections assumes huge economic im portance as a growth industry which provides stable jobs.

The punishment juggernaut of the Reagan-Bush years also spawned an array of private enterprises locked in a parasitic embrace with the state. From architectural firms and construction companies, to drug treatment and food service contractors, to prison industries, to the whole gamut of equipment and hardware suppliers-steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, uniforms, etc.-the business of imprisonment boasts a powerful assortment of well-or ganized and well-represented vested interests. Privatized prisons, then, are not a quantum leap toward dismantling the state but simply an extension of the already significant private sector involvement in corrections. The public-private symbiotic relationship was well-established long before 1984, when CCA first contracted with the INS to operate detention centers for illegal aliens. With private firms already providing everything from health care to drug treatment, the private management of entire prisons was a natural progression, especially given the tenor of the times.

If the profit to be made by controlling and incarcerating fellow citizens were to disappear, the US economy would be in even bigger trouble than it is now.

There’s a lot of nastiness that can be turned a blind eye to when livelihoods’re on the line: prison officers in privatised prisons get between $7 and $10 an hour, or around $31 per diem and their positions are shaky. The boat cannot be rocked or poverty (and worse) can result. In state and federal prisons there are pensions and benefits to be protected: whistleblowing is not what they do. A steady job with benefits is preciousin uncertain times.

After all they’re just criminals anyway, and overwhelmingly dark-skinned criminals at at that. Who gives a shit? Out of sight, out of mind, invisible people with no rights.

Those paid by government to run prisons, who then torture their fellow citizens simply for the pleasure of it, are indeed psychopaths and should be treated as such. But what about the complicity of industry bosses and the state and federal government? If the guards are psychopaths, what does that make their superiors? They hire these people, knowing and not caring (or choosing not to know) that they have a proclivity for sadism. Why?

Pour encourager les autres. That means you and me. This is not an aberration, this is the way it’s meant to be.

But if one day the torture they’ve committed or condoned returns to bite them or their loved ones on the ass well, karma’s a bitch and what goes around comes around. You won’t catch me shedding many tears.

Categories: Civil liberties, Life under Capitalism, Policing, Torture