Max Weber says the state is defined by its monopoly on violence. Okay, if you're going to have a monopoly on violence, have a monopoly on violence.
Instead, the state seems to run parallel systems: outside of prison, it has a monopoly on violence, but within prison, it has a monopoly on violence suppression. And in both places, the state uses its monopolies to injure.
I believe our treatment of prisoners is shameful. Most Americans either don't care (because prisoners are hidden from view) or think it's great (because the barbarism of prison serves as a deterrent to crime). But the state has a responsibility to not abuse its citizens, which includes its prisoners. If the general public likes inhumane prisons, at least the state should care to stop it.
Instead, the state thinks it's pretty great, too. The biggest deterrent most Americans contemplate when reflecting on potential crime isn't the loss of liberty associated with prison, it's the loss of safety. The state publicizes its failure to protect its prisoners; far from being ashamed of its dereliction of duty, the state trades on it.
In this blog post by Christopher Glazek we gain a glimpse of the problem. (For those of you who don't like to think about prisoners as people, don't read the article, which details the abuses borne by less-harmless criminals.)
The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
The old official estimate was off by more than 23,000%. That's not a "whoops, my bad," that's a refusal to see the problem.
I suspect most Americans would say, "What's the problem? If you don't want to be abused, don't be a criminal." This glib response ignores the very real possibility that not every convict is a criminal, and it ignores the police state reality in which we live, where everyone is a criminal who but for the grace of the state's merciful leniency would find himself in the same position. One teenaged boy caused $500 worth of property damage and was subsequently raped for 10 weeks in adult prison until he killed himself (he had completed about 2% of his sentence).
Does eight years of sexual abuse sound like a fitting punishment to $500 of property damage? How much sexual abuse is fitting punishment? How about "none"? Hugh Nibley calls converting life into property "the Mahan principle," the "great secret" Cain received from Satan (see Nibley, Approaching Zion). The decline of American society begun in the late 1960s and the 1970s was not stopped so much as it was hidden behind prison walls. The utter lack of humanity required to perpetuate this system shows that the decline of the American spirit has continued unabated, even while we have declared victory on the basis of rigged crime statistics.
via oneofthebest
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