The Dark Side Of America Exists:
We Must Reform Our Stateside Abu Ghraibs
Ev Peters
05/18/04: "ICH" In 1764, an Italo-Austrian jurist named Cesare Beccaria published his famous Essay On Crimes And Punishments, which was one of the first compelling arguments against the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Beccaria's ideas were widely acclaimed in Western Europe, and had a profound impact on subsequent generations of utilitarian philosophers, prison reformers, and framers of universal
human rights.
We could still learn from Cesare Beccaria's ideas today.
In 1862, French novelist Victor Hugo published his magnum opus, Les Misérables. It tells the story of two men. One is the former prisoner Jean Valjean, who -- embittered over 19 years of inhumane treament in prison -- violates his parole by changing his name. The other is the former prison-guard turned Inspector Javert, who fanatically pursues Valjean over two decades. The morally-blind Javert cannot see beyond his own self-righteousness, so he never notices, despite many object lessons, that Valjean has undergone a profound psychospiritual transformation. Gradually, Javert's merciless obsession with "justice" reaches a crisis-point, during which his raison d'être collapses: (A) from one of absolute certitude that he is a legal-and-good man chasing down an incorrigible subhuman evildoer; to (B) the shocking realization he is a legal-but-evil man who is persecuting a much better man who is technically illegal but
wholly redeemed.
We could still learn from Victor Hugo's story today. Doesn't it's scenario sound familiar?
If not, then perhaps this contemporary scenario will sound more familiar: guard-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-prisoner beatings; forced nudity and sadistically-sexualized humiliations; rampant drug abuse and widespread rape, leading to untreated communicable diseases? Although this litany of human-rights abuses arguably is worse than either Hugo's fictional Les Misérables or Baghdad's
real Abu Ghraib, it describes the dark reality of daily life inside the USA's stateside nonmilitary prisons!
Hence, the New York Times editorial in today's International Herald Tribune, which rightly argues that we need to: (A) stop tolerating these inhumane Abu Ghraib-like practices inside our underscrutinized prisons; and (B) start challenging routine prisoner abuse through a human-rights based national prison-review board's regulatory oversight.
Conclusions: These sadistic human-rights abuses inside our prisons have gone unchallenged because the voices of the progressive reformers have fallen silent in American politics, journalism, and religion, whereas they should have put a stop to these outrageous practices decades ago Thus, the American people should be asking themselves "What has caused America's men and women alike to become so morally indifferent that they are willing to turn a blind eye toward these unconscionably inhumane widespread human-rights abuses inside their own prisons
The Bottom Line: Unless we've learned nothing since the time of Cesare Beccaria and Victor Hugo, we must recognize that the USA's prison system is broken, and insist on these long-overdue reforms: (1) regulatory oversight of our entire prison system should be modeled after the European Union's successful prison-watch group, the human-rights based Committee on the Prevention of Torture ("CPT"); (2) our lawmakers must promptly legislate and implement a CPT-like American regulatory body to oversee all of the nation's prisons and jails, and thereby to eliminate the aforementioned human-rights violations; but (3) first, we'll have to develop a social conscience about inherently-wrong acts, such as turning a blind eye to flagrant violations of human rights when they're
occurring right under our own noses
ENDNOTES
[1] Read the NYT's 5-18-04 IHT editorial b
http://www.iht.com/articles/520368.htm
[2] Read Christopher Brauchli's 5-15-04 CD/BDC essay "Abuses In Iraq -- And Brooklyn"
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0515-03.htm
[3] For a research-based answer, read John Schwartz's 5-7-04 IHT essay: "Tests In U.S. Predicted Prison Guard Behavior"
http://www.iht.com/articles/518733.html
[4] For a gender-based answer, read Barbara Ehrenreich's 5-16-04 CD/LAT essay: "Feminism's Assumptions Upended: A Uterus Is Not A Substitute For A Conscience" http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0516-02.htm
[5] Americans can do no better than to read, and take to heart, the thirty articles in this illuminating statement of every person's human rights: Universal Declaration of Human Rights" http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
Copyright: Ev Peters <EvPeters8@aol.com> |
