Deeply Imperfect Abuse

Alec Dubro

March 08, 2007

“We do not issue these reports because we think ourselves perfect, but rather because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday . The occasion was the release of the State Department’s annual human rights report. Doubtless, Rice was referring to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, admitting what is too well-documented to deny.

Nevertheless, the State Department took China to task for blocking Internet sites and accused Russia and Venezuela of “serious regression in several areas, mainly in centralizing power in the executive branch.” Nasty stuff, centralizing executive power. But, to demonstrate its fairness, the report examines everyone, including the United Kingdom, which, said State, has seen “occasional abuse of detainees and other persons by individual members of the police and military; overcrowded prison conditions and some inadequate prison infrastructure.”

So, no one escapes the scrutiny of our human rights monitors—except, of course, us. We have to look to our unofficial observers like Human Rights Watch, the ACLU and various citizen groups. With even a cursory reading of reports from those organizations, I came away believing that we were not merely “deeply imperfect,” but a major human rights violator.

As bad as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are, they’re footnotes compared to the routine, everyday brutality and dehumanization of our prison system. There are some things that are too hidden to be seen, but there are others which are so vast that we no longer see them, like air pollution or advertising. Prison abuse is like that.

The sheer scale of our incarceration system remains astounding—if you can get yourself to focus on it. According to the 2005 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons , “The daily count of prisoners in the United States has surpassed 2.2 million. Over the course of a year, 13.5 million people spend time in jail or prison…” True, a lot of people are just passing through, spending a few days until they’re bailed out or dismissed. But there are millions who essentially live inside one of the country’s nearly 5,000 adult prisons and jails.

And what goes on in there? The commissioners issued a Q & A to go with their final report. One question read: "Are the problems described in the report—violence, medical neglect, inappropriate uses of segregation and others—problems everywhere?" And the commissioners answered it:

These are the most detrimental conditions of confinement. That doesn’t mean, however, that the problems are equally severe everywhere or that some correctional facilities are not safe and healthy.

So there you have it. Some of our nation’s prisons are safe and healthy. But in the rest, your life expectancy begins to diminish the day you arrive. The violence comes from both guards and other inmates, and is a way of life in many prisons. Medical neglect affects many of the 350,000 full-time prisoners with serious mental afflictions, but also those with communicable diseases which they then bring back into the world. And “inappropriate segregation” means that more and more prisoners are put into isolation, which is, in itself, a form of torture.

But these are just mundane overviews. Human Rights Watch has documented some of the horror stories that manage to make it outside prison walls. For instance:

Many of the victims of prison abuse are not very nice people. But they’re not likely to be tortured into becoming any nicer, either. And 95 percent of those in prison or jail will be released sometime, so their families and community will bear the consequences of prison-induced dysfunction.

What are the alternatives to prison? Well, for one thing, they’re not prisons. And for another, the causes and reinforcement of crime are so woven into society’s fabric that to change the United States to a low-crime nation will take a lot of time and a lot of money. And right now, most voters would rather see their money put into prisons than into the costly, painstaking efforts that deter criminal behavior. It’s not that no one is trying to prevent crime—many people teach, counsel and steer potential criminals away from self-destructive behavior. But as a nation, these efforts are half-hearted at best. We’ve been so acclimatized by a constant diet of crime news and endless cop shows that somewhere in us we believe that there is a heroic, tough and dramatic answer to the problem. There isn’t.

The results of a law and order ideology is exactly what we have today: plenty of criminals and a prison system that is, by any rational standards, a human rights violation on a national scale. So, yes, we are deeply imperfect, but we’re also criminally negligent and systematically brutal. That would put us in not very good company in the State Department’s report—if we had the courage to size ourselves up as we do others.