Psyche, Science, and Society

Background on the Iraq coup d’etat

Earlier today I promised to post another article from AlterNet providing background on the civil war/coup d’etat going on in Shiite Iraq. The key idea:

Maliki’s goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit U.S. approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold a vote.

Here is the complete article. Bookmark it to refer to as the crisis develops:

Iraq:Five Things You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq

By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar

The traditional media is incapable of reporting what’s going on in Southern Iraq.

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to “crack down” — with coalition air support — on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad’s Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra’s main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.

There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. “The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans,” one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor‘s Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the “same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store.”

A political track is also in play: Sadr has called on his followers to take to the streets to demand Maliki’s resignation, and nationalist lawmakers in the Iraqi Parliament, led by al-Sadr’s block, are trying to push a no-confidence vote challenging the prime minister’s regime.

The conflict is one that the U.S. media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The prevailing narrative is that Basra has been ruled by mafialike militias — which is true — and that Iraqi government forces are now cracking down on the lawlessness in preparation for regional elections, which is not. As independent analyst Reider Visser noted:

“On closer inspection, there are problems in these accounts. Perhaps most importantly, there is a discrepancy between the description of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural) … [and the] facts of the ongoing operations, which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [SIIC], as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadila party (sic) (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.”

The conflict doesn’t conform to the analysis of the roots of Iraqi instability as briefed by U.S. officials in the heavily-fortified Green Zone. It also doesn’t fit into the simplistic but popular narrative of a country wrought by sectarian violence, and its nature is obscured by the labels that the commercial media uncritically apply to the disparate centers of Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

The “crackdown” comes on the heels of the approval of a new “provincial law,” which will ultimately determine whether Iraq remains a unified state with a strong central government or is divided into sectarian-based regional governates. The measure calls for provincial elections in October, and the winners of those elections will determine the future of the Iraqi state. Control of the country’s oil wealth, and how its treasure will be developed, will also be significantly influenced by the outcome of the elections.

It’s a relatively straightforward story: Iraq is ablaze today as a result of an attempt to impose Colombian-style democracy on the unstable country: Maliki’s goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit U.S. approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold a vote.

To better understand the nature of this latest round of conflict, here are five things one needs to know about what’s taking place across Iraq.

1. A visible manifestation of Iraq’s central-but-under-teported political conflict (not “sectarian violence”)

Iraq, which had experienced little or no sectarian-based violence prior to the U.S. invasion, has been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq’s formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and “sectarian violence” has become Americans’ primary explanation for the instability that has plagued the country.

But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict, one that has been poorly analyzed in the mainstream press. The real source of conflict in Iraq — and the reason political reconciliation has been so difficult — is a fundamental disagreement over what the future of Iraq will look like. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists — with Muqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice — who desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country’s vast oil reserves and who forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq’s political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces.

The nationalists now represent a majority in Iraq’s parliament but are opposed by what might be called Iraqi separatists, who envision a “soft partition” of Iraq into at least four semiautonomous and sectarian-based regional entities, welcome the privatization of the Iraqi energy sector (and the rest of the Iraqi economy) and rely on foreign support to maintain their power.

We’ve written about this long-standing conflict extensively in the past, and now we’re seeing it come to a head, as we believed it would at some point.

2. U.S. is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform

One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Muqtada al-Sadr as a “renegade,” “radical” or “militant” cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. His ostensible militancy appears to arise primarily from his opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

He has certainly been willing to use violence in the past, but the “firebrand” label belies the fact that Sadr is arguably the most popular leader among a large section of the Iraqi population and that he has forcefully rejected sectarian conflict and sought to bring together representatives of Iraq’s various ethnic and sectarian groups in an effort to create real national reconciliation — a process that the highly sectarian Maliki regime has failed to accomplish.

It’s vitally important to understand that Sadr’s popularity and legitimacy is a result of his having a platform that’s favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis.

Most Iraqis:

• Favor a strong central government free of the influence of militias.
• Oppose, by a 2-1 margin, the privatization of Iraq’s energy sector — a “benchmark towards progress according to the Bush administration.
• Favor a U.S. withdrawal on a short timeline (PDF) (most believe the United States plans to build permanent bases — both are issues about which the Sadrists have been vocal.
• Oppose al Qaeda and the ideology of Osama Bin Laden and, to a lesser degree, Iranian influence on Iraq’s internal affairs.

With the exception of their opposition to Al Qaeda, the five major separatist parties — Sunni, Shia and Kurdish — that make up Maliki’s governing coalition are on the deeply unpopular side of these issues. A poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Iraqis think the Iraqi government is doing a poor job, and Maliki himself has a Bush-like 66 percent disapproval rate.

As in Vietnam, the United States is backing an unpopular and decidedly undemocratic government in Iraq, and that simple fact explains much of the violent resistance that’s going on in Iraq today.

3. “Iraqi forces” are, in fact, “Iranian- (and U.S.-) backed Shiite militias”

Every headline this week has featured some variation of the storyline of “Iraqi security forces” battling “Shiite militias.” But the reality is that it is a battle between Shite militias — separatists and nationalists — with one militia garbed in Iraqi army uniforms and supported by U.S. airpower, and the other in civilian clothes.

It has always been the great irony of the occupation of Iraq that “our” man in Baghdad is also Tehran’s. Maliki heads the Dawa Party, which has long enjoyed close ties to Iran, and relies on support from SIIC, a staunchly pro-Iranian party, and its powerful Badr militia. The “government crackdown” is an escalation of a long-simmering conflict in the south between the Badr Brigade, the Sadrists and members of the Fadhila Party, which favors greater autonomy for Basra but rejects SIIC’s vision of a larger Shiite-dominated regional entity in Southern Iraq.

4. Colombia-style democracy

Basra has been engulfed in a simmering conflict since before the British pulled their troops back to a remote base near the airport and turned over the city to Iraqi authorities. But the timing of this crackdown is not coincidental; Iraqi separatists — Dawa, SIIC and others — are expected to do poorly in the regional elections, while the Sadrists are widely anticipated to make significant gains. It is widely perceived by those loyal to Sadr that this is an attempt to wipe out the movement he leads prior to the elections and minimize the influence that Iraqi nationalists are poised to gain.

The United States, for its part, continues to take sides in this conflict — in addition to providing airpower, U.S. forces are enforcing the curfew in Sadr City — rather than playing the role of neutral mediator. That’s because the interests of the Bush administration and its allies are aligned with Maliki and his coalition. That they are not aligned with the interests of most Iraqis is never mentioned in the Western press, but is a key reason why Bush’s definition of “victory” — the emergence of a legitimate and Democratic state that supports U.S. policy in the region — has always been an impossible pipedream.

5. Chip off the old block: Maliki’s attempt to criminalize dissent

It’s unclear whether Sadr has lifted the cease-fire entirely, or simply freed his fighters to defend themselves. He continues to call for peaceful resistance.

Whatever the case may be, it’s not entirely accurate to say that he “chose” this conflict. The reality is that while his army was holding the cease-fire, attacks on and detentions of Sadrists have continued unabated. Sadr renewed the cease-fire last month, but he did so over the urging of his top aides, who argued that their movement was threatened with annihilation. He later authorized his followers to carry weapons “for self-defense” to head off a mutiny within his ranks.

Ahmed al-Massoudi, a Sadrist member of Parliament, last week “accused the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) of planning a military campaign to liquidate the Sadrists.”

The lawmaker told Voices of Iraq that Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim’s “SIIC and the Dawa Party have held meetings with officers of the militias merged recently into security agencies to launch a military campaign outwardly to impose order and law, but the real objective is to liquidate the Sadrist bloc.” “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is directly supervising this scheme with officers from the Dawa Party and the SIIC,” he added. Despite his close ties with Tehran and deep involvement in Shiite militia activity, Hakim has been invited to the White House, where he was feted by Bush himself.

Sadr called for nationwide civil disobedience that would have allowed his followers to flex some political muscle in a nonviolent way. His orders, according to Iraqi reports were to distribute olive branches and copies of the Koran to soldiers at checkpoints.

The Maliki regime responded by saying that individuals joining the nationwide strike would be punished and that those organizing it are in violation of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Act issued in 2005. A spokesman for the prime minister promised to punish any government employees who failed to show up for work.

This is consistent with a long-term trend: the U.S.-backed government’s obstruction of Iraqi efforts to foster political reconciliation among diverse groups of Iraq nationalists. (Read more about this here.)

Propaganda and the surge

The Maliki regime has set an ultimatum demanding that the militias — the nationalist militias — lay down their arms within the next two days or face “more serious consequences.” Al-Sadr has also issued an ultimatum: The government must cease its attacks on his followers, or his followers will escalate. It is an extremely dangerous situation, especially given the fact that the main U.S. resupply routes stretch from Baghdad through the Shia-dominated southern provinces.

But the precariousness of the situation appears to be of little concern to the military command, which issued a statement saying that the violence was a result of the success of the U.S. troop “surge” (Bush called the “crackdown” a “bold decision” that shows the country’s security forces are capable of combating terrorists). It’s yet another example of the administration putting U.S. geostrategic (and economic) interests ahead of Iraqi reconciliation and democratic governance.

The much-touted troop “surge” had little to do with the drop in violence in recent months — it didn’t even correlate with the lull chronologically and was certainly a minor causal factor at best. A number of factors led to the reduced violence, but Sadr’s cease-fire had the greatest impact. Nonetheless, the Maliki regime, backed by the United States, continued a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Sadr’s followers, denied them space to peacefully resist the occupation and forced his hand.

Given the degree to which the coalition has continued to stir a hornets’ nest, we may be seeing a perfect illustration of the dangers of believing one’s own propaganda play out as Iraq is once again set aflame.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle.

March 27th, 2008

Iraqi government and US launch coup d’etat

Patrick Cockburn in the Independent provides some background on the intra-Shia civil war erupting in Iraq. the crucial phrase is:

Mr Sadr’s followers believe the government is trying to eliminate them before elections in southern Iraq later this year, which they are expected to win.

This flags the motive as being the profoundly anti-democratic one of imposing an unpopular occupier-friendly regime on a resistant population. If the fighting spreads, the casualties could be enormous as the “government” will have to impose its will on the majority of Shiites in many areas, if not across the country.

It is important to not buy the spin that this is a struggle to suppress militias. The government would not survive without its militias, including the Badr Corp of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. These militias are being joined by the official army, not suppressed by it. After all, the Badr Corp has infiltrated much of the official government security apparatus. I will post another good background article later. In the meantime, here’s Cockburn’s piece:

Iraq implodes as Shia fights Shia
Another tragedy as the Shia majority turn on each other

By Patrick Cockburn

A new civil war is threatening to explode in Iraq as American-backed Iraqi government forces fight Shia militiamen for control of Basra and parts of Baghdad.

Heavy fighting engulfed Iraq’s two largest cities and spread to other towns yesterday as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, gave fighters of the Mehdi Army, led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, 72 hours to surrender their weapons.

The gun battles between soldiers and militiamen, who are all Shia Muslims, show that Iraq’s majority Shia community – which replaced Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime – is splitting apart for the first time.

Mr Sadr’s followers believe the government is trying to eliminate them before elections in southern Iraq later this year, which they are expected to win.

Mortars and rockets launched from Mehdi Army-controlled districts of Baghdad struck the Green Zone, the seat of American power in Iraq, for the third day yesterday, seriously wounding three Americans. Two rockets hit the parking lot of the Iraqi cabinet. The mixed area of al-Mansur in west Baghdad, where shops had begun to reopen in recent months, was deserted yesterday as Mehdi Army fighters were rumoured among local people to be moving in from the nearby Shia stronghold of Washash. “We expect an attack by the Shia in spite of the Americans being spread over Sunni districts to defend them,” said a Sunni resident.

Forty people have been killed and at least 200 injured in Basra in the last two days of violence. In the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad, 11 people were killed and 18 injured yesterday by a US air strike called in support of Iraqi forces following street battles with Shia militia members in the city’s Thawra neighbourhood. In Baghdad, 14 have been killed and 140 wounded.

The supporters of Mr Sadr, who form the largest political movement in Iraq, blame the Americans for giving the go-ahead for Mr Maliki’s offensive against them and supporting it with helicopters and bomber aircraft. US troops have sealed off Sadr City, the close-packed slum in the capital with a population that is the main bastion of the Sadrists, while the Mehdi Army has taken over its streets, establishing checkpoints, each manned by about 20 heavily armed men. It is unlikely that the militiamen in Basra will surrender as demanded by the government. Sadiq al-Rikabi, an adviser to Mr Maliki, said those who kept their weapons would be arrested. “Any gunman who does not do that within three days will be an outlaw.”

Streets were empty in Basra and Baghdad as people stayed at home to avoid the fighting. The Mehdi Army is enforcing a strike in Baghdad with mosques calling for the closure of shops, businesses and schools.

In the Shia city of Kut, on the Tigris south of Baghdad, local residents say that black-clad Mehdi Army militiamen have taken over five districts and expelled the police.

At the same time, Mr Sadr is clearly eager to continue the truce which he declared on 29 August last year after bloody clashes in Kerbala with Iraqi police controlled by the rival Shia political movement, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and their well-organised militia, the Badr organisation.

He renewed this ceasefire in February, saying he wanted to purge its ranks of criminals. “The freeze that Sadr has ordered is still ongoing,” said one of his chief lieutenants, Luwaa Smaism.

Mr Sadr has sought to avoid an all-out military confrontation with American troops or Badr backed by American forces since he fought two ferocious battles for Najaf against US marines in 2004.

Mr Sadr has sent emissaries to Mr Maliki asking him to remove his troops, numbering some 15,000 men from Basra, and to resolve problems peacefully. But his aides say there will be no talks until the Iraqi army reinforcements are withdrawn. The offer of talks is in keeping with Mr Sadr’s past behaviour, which is to appear conciliatory but in practice to make few real concessions. The US is claiming that the Sadrists are not being singled out, only Iran-supported militia factions, but this will find few believers in Iraq.

“This is not a battle against the [Mehdi Army] nor is it a proxy war between the United States and Iran,” said a US military spokesman, Major General Kevin Bergner. “It is [the] government of Iraq taking the necessary action to deal with criminals on the streets.”

The Sunni population is pleased to see the government and the Americans attacking the Mehdi Army, which they see as a Shia death squad. “Before, the Shia were arresting and killing us and forcing us to leave Iraq for Jordan and Syria where we lived in misery,” said Osama Sabr, a Sunni in west Baghdad.

The fighting is threatening to disrupt Iraq’s oil production, most of which comes from the Basra area, because workers in the oilfields dare not leave their homes.

The militia

The Mehdi Army

Armed wing of the Sadr movement. Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia is divided, with one wing supporting the radical cleric’s ceasefire while another has rejected it and continued attacks on Iraqi government forces and the British base at Basra aiport.

The Badr Brigade

Armed wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. The Badr Brigade has been involved in numerous clashes with the Mehdi Army and appears not to be the target of the current offensive by the Iraqi government forces. The group has organised “spontaneous” demonstrations against General Mohan and General Jalil.

The Fadhila

A political party and armed group with a localised powerbase. The governor of Basra is a member of the party, and it controls a significant proportion of the region’s oil supply.

Secret Cells

Said to be armed and trained by Iran and allegedly carrying out attacks ordered by Tehran.

March 27th, 2008

NPR downplays Iraqi dead

FAIR has issued an Action Alert: NPR Underreports Iraq Deaths, dealing with an NPR report by Scott Simon in which he stated:

“This coming Wednesday marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. So far 3,975 U.S. service men and women have died. Estimates on the number of Iraqis killed range from 47,000 to 151,000, depending on the source.”

These numbers are, of course, silly. The 151,000 presumably comes from the recent World Health Organization/Iraqi Ministry of Health study recently reported in NEJM. FAIR speculates that th 47,000 is from Iraq Body Count, but it is their estimate of those killed as of June 2006 [In the email below I erred and said August] and is considerably higher now, around 85,000. And other studies from the Lancet and the British polling firm ORB yield far higher estimates of around one million [extrapolating the Lancet study]. Thus, the number of dead from violence is almost certainly at least 250,000 and most likely higher, perhaps far higher. NPR miserably failed its listeners, the Iraqi people, and the truth in this instance. Alas, this is far from the only time that NPR has been a vessel for propaganda supporting the war.

FAIR calls upon concerned listeners to write the NPR ombudsman and ask for an investigation. Here is my email:

I hope that you will look into the very misleading figures in the March 15 braodcast in which Scott Simon described estimates of Iraqis killed since the war began as from 47,000 to 151,000. As a researcher, I have followed this area closely. I can imagine no credible source for the 47,000 figure as Iraq Body Count (IBC, which counts those dead reported in the Western media, puts the current figure of such reported deaths as over 80,000.  IBC is certainly a radical undercount given the exigencies of reporting in a war-torn country where over 100 reporters have been killed and many others kidnapped or arrested.

Further, the 151,000 figure, from the World Health Organization and Iraqi Ministry of Health, was as of August 2006, before the most intense violence.

Further, several additional studies from Johns Hopkins epidemiologists (published in the Lancet) and from the British ORB polling organization have arrived at far higher figures. Johns Hopkins estimated around 600,000 victims of violence by summer 2006 and the ORB estimated around 1,000,000 by the end of 2007.

Surely NPR listeners, as they weigh the five years of war deserve accurate information on the current state of knowledge on the true costs of that war.This Ameriacan Life has reported on the Lancet studies. Surely over reporters should as well. Much as I love Scott Simon, in this case, his report was grossly deceptive at best. The purpose of NPR is to create an informed citizenry. In this instance you failed your mission.

Please investigate and make sure that such an egregious error does not recur.

Thank you very much.

Post your email here.

March 26th, 2008

Domestic torture the supermax way

Dealing as we do so often with torture and abuse of national security detainees, we have devoted insufficient attention to the horrifying abuses of our criminal justice system. Among the most horrifying are the supermax prisons designs to break human souls through total isolation and deprivation.  Alternet has an article reminding us of these conditions in these concentration camps:

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons

 By Jessica Pupovac

In supermax prisons, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement is the norm. How did our prison system become so cruel?

Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, “the yard.” If you’re lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.

You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it’s only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.

You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must “earn” two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it’s a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.

This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a “Supermax” state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.

Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold “supermax” facilities, or “control units,” designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be “unmanageable” by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.

Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.

The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners’ physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.’ sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country’s international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it “extremely harsh.” “The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to,” they stated, “the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

“Sending someone to a supermax is punishment”

Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. “It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them,” she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. “Sending someone to a supermax is punishment,” Mills told AlterNet, “and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing.” “Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say ‘I didn’t do it’ and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you,” he said. “The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement.” Mills claims he has “tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers.”

Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, “Their behavior is their input,” and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a “case-by-case basis,” he wasn’t able to expand further on the process.

Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being “influential,” among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago’s infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the “pistol” in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been “against the code,” — so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.

At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries — he was transferred to several over the years — was manageable, since, in his words, “the animals were running the zoo.” Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, “the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden,” and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. “Might made right.”

Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or “CMAX.” With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department’s “most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates,” according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.

Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn’t been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, “they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers.” Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.

“Many of these inmates have become psychotic”

The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew “it was a different world.” All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. “Imagine if you’ve been smoking 20 years,” he says. “Overnight you can’t smoke no more, overnight you can’t talk to your kids no more.” The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.

After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates’ mental health slipping. “You get these guys and they don’t know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up,” he recalled, adding that some would go so far as “taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis,” or even worse, attempting suicide.

One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for “psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness.” Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons that he had evaluated of “scores of inmates” who “psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary.” “Many of these inmates,” he said. “have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior.”

Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: “The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months.” “The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer’s head,” he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.

The Innocent Victims

Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. “I told her, you didn’t commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that’s to come,” he recounted. But she didn’t. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC’s claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long “shock treatment” for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. “What I had a problem with, being an inmate’s wife,” Denise says, “was how they degraded the inmates.” She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.

Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. “Every time my wife sent me pictures, she’d send me sets of 24, and I’d say, ‘ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,’ because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week].” Inmates remain in ‘seg’ for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son’s hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. “My heart dropped to my knees,” he says, “I told them, ‘ya’ll let this picture in here!’”

The violation earned him a ticket to “seg” for six months — months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for “good time.” The decision meant that Berry’s sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son’s college graduation. “I was thinking, ‘You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you’ve got to make this college graduation,” Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture — Berry’s brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew — were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. “I had to obtain their birth certificates,” she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins’s office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, “all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing.”

Berry’s son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. “I missed my son’s graduation,” he said, “and it crushed me.”

Long-Term Effects

A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle — or realistically afford.

The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs — especially for minority populations — as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have “earned” it.

According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, “the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value.” Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners — an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.

As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, “What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it’s in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. “The experiences inmates have in prison — whether violent or redemptive — do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society,” he said. “Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions.”

Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that “staff training” would be an “effective alternative to supermax prisons.” It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to “use segregation cells in each prison facility,” “provide targeted rehabilitative services,” and “provide opportunities for spiritual development.”

Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners — and the rationale behind it — they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.

Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he’s also working to cut off the “school-to-prisons pipeline” in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, “Saving Our Sons.”

Berry’s work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to “relinquish everything, even your personality,” Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system.

Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.

4 comments March 24th, 2008

Paul Hipp: 4,000 dead

March 24th, 2008

Social psychology of racial equality: Unequal perspectives

The Washington Post today has an interesting exploration of new results on the social psychology of race relations. Whites, they report, think more about how far we’ve come from the bad old days, and think things are nearly fine. Blacks, however, think of how far we are from true equality and are profoundly disturbed. Whites claim they would be willing to be born black for a mere $5,000:

Unequal Perspectives on Racial Equality

By Shankar Vedantam

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the “costs” of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

“The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it,” said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. “You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000.”

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) — painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.

Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.

“Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned,” Mazzocco said. “Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege.”

But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past — and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.

When Eibach asked each group to use the other’s yardstick — whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past — the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way — and had a long way to go.

In a speech last week, Obama similarly argued that his former pastor had failed to acknowledge how America had changed for the better. But Wright’s critics, Obama added, were also wrong — because true equality is still remote.

The intriguing question prompted by Eibach’s study is why whites and blacks are unconsciously drawn to different yardsticks. Eibach said one reason might be that racial equality means different things to whites and blacks: Whites see it as an ideal, blacks as a necessity. When people evaluate progress toward idealistic or optional goals — saving for a vacation — they tend to focus on progress made. But when people think of necessities — paying the rent — they focus on how much they are short.

In another set of experiments, social psychologist Amanda Brodish at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that prejudice may play a role, too. Whites with high levels of prejudice — who think blacks are not as smart as whites, who think blacks and whites are inherently unequal, and who reported being uncomfortable with a black roommate — invariably evaluated racial equality only in comparison with the past.

By contrast, said Brodish’s co-author, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, low-prejudice whites were equally willing to apply the yardsticks of both past and future.

While comparisons with a dreadful past and an ideal future produce glass-is-half-empty-vs.-half-full perceptions, the choices are not equivalent. Each perception is accurate, but Eibach said that progress toward true equality required whites to focus on where the country ought to be instead of becoming complacent about how far the country had come.

“There is a disconnect between whites and blacks about what it feels like to be a victim of mundane discrimination,” Eibach concluded. “There is a tendency to say, ‘These mundane things are nothing like the past,’ but the lived reality of bearing that weight — the frustrations and indignities — that is a major source of the disconnect.”

March 24th, 2008

Palast: God Damn America — Especially Pennsylvania

Greg Palast, in his inimitable way, illuminated Pastor Wright’s relevance to Pennsylvania whites:

God Damn America — Especially Pennsylvania
by Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank. One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.

But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.

That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”

Whatever. It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a, “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”

(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it.”

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”

So, why hasn’t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?

***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

March 24th, 2008

PBS series on health disparities: Unatural Causes

Apropos the New York Times article I posted earlier today o increasing health disparities between rich and poor in the US, a friend has just sent this notice of a related upcoming PBS series, Unnatural Causes, which asks “is inequality making us sick?” that starts this week. Here is the series summary that she sent:

UNNATURAL CAUSES sheds light on mounting evidence that demonstrates how work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can actually get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. But it’s not just the poor who are sick—so are the middle classes. At each descending rung of the socio-economic ladder, people tend to be sicker and die sooner. What’s more, at every level, many communities of color are worse off than their white counterparts. Compelling personal stories—spanning the country—demonstrate how social conditions are as vital to our health as diet, smoking and exercise.  As Harvard epidemiologist David Williams points out, investing in our schools, improving housing, integrating neighborhoods, better jobs and wages, giving people more control over their work, these are as much health strategies as smoking diet and exercise. And these are the stories that UNNATURAL CAUSES tells.

HOUR ONE: In Sickness and In Wealth (56 mins) What are the connections between healthy bodies and healthy bank accounts? In Louisville, Kentucky, the issues faced by a CEO, a lab supervisor, a janitor, and a welfare mother bring into sharp relief how socio-economic status shapes opportunities to lead healthy lives.  People of color face an additional burden. Solutions, public health officials believe, lie not in more pills but in better social policies.

HOUR TWO: When the Bough Breaks (28 mins) and Becoming American (28 min)
Why do African American infant mortality rates remain more than twice as high as white Americans? Researchers are circling in on a provocative hypothesis:  the chronic stress of racism can become embedded in African American mothers’ bodies and take a toll on their children even before they leave the womb.

In contrast, recent Mexican immigrants, though often poorer, tend to be healthier than the average American. But the longer they live here, the worse their relative health becomes. What’s protective about new immigrant communities that we can all learn from? And what erodes this shield over time?

HOUR THREE: Bad Sugar (28 min) and Place Matters (28 min) The O’odham Indians of Arizona suffer one of the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes in the world. But is this due to their genes, or is it part of the body’s response to decades of poverty, oppression and historical trauma? A new approach rooted in the community re-gaining control over its destiny offers hope where medical-only interventions have failed.

Why is your street address such a good predictor of your health? How can your surrounding built and social environment get inside your body like smog and toxic waste? As recent immigrants move into long-neglected African American urban neighborhoods, their health is beginning to deteriorate too. What can be done to create healthy communities?

HOUR FOUR:  Collateral Damage (28 min) and Not Just a Paycheck (28 min)

Globalization and the U.S. military have disrupted the lives of Marshall Islanders. Many have ended up in the unlikely place of Springdale, Arkansas where a legacy of poverty and powerlessness continues to take a toll on their bodies.

In western Michigan, a factory closure undermines the lives and health of a white, working class community. But the same company shut down their Swedish plant with hardly a ripple thanks to very different social policies.

http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/

March 23rd, 2008

May 3: Torture and the American Psyche

For those in the Boston area, here’s an announcement of a forum that I am both helping to organize and speaking at. A flyer, suitable for printing and posting, is available here:

Torture and the American Psyche:
Blurring the Boundaries Between Healers and Interrogators
Saturday, May 3, 2008,
9:30 am – 12:30 pm

First Parish Unitarian Church,
382 Walnut Street,
Brookline, MA
http://www.firstparishinbrookline.org

admission is free

DESCRIPTION:

Every day the news brings further details about our country’s recent use of torture and other detainee abuse in national security, and of the debates among our leaders and citizens of practical, legal, and ethical implications of this use. We invite concerned citizens and members of the mental health professions to join together in an open discussion of the far reaching human and moral implications of our nation’s use of torture.

We will discuss the emotional and ethical consequences of being members of a society that sanctions torture and that uses psychologists to make sure abuse is medically and “ethically” conducted. We will have three speakers, followed by a discussion among the panelists and with the members of the audience on the diverse aspects of this topic. Our aim is to facilitate a discussion which will include the emotional, ethical and spiritual dimensions of this topic and allow room for all to participate.

We understand that the topic will give pause to all who consider attending and care will be taken to ensure that the discussion will not devolve into a political diatribe or an immersion into a graphic depiction of torture. We hope that some perspective on feasible actions may emerge from the discussion.

SPEAKERS:

Eric Fair currently a divinity student at Princeton will speak from his experience as a civilian contract interrogator in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib in early 2004. He will lend his first person account to our conversation.

Leonard Rubenstein, J.D. President of Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Prize winning organization, is an attorney and veteran of many human rights struggles. He will speak of the role of torture in our contemporary political culture.

David Sloan-Rossiter, Ph.D. will bring his long standing interest in using a psych oana¬lytic perspective to aid communities to the role of moderator of the program. He is co-chair of the Curriculum Committee at Boston Institute for Psychotherapy and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D. a local psychoanalyst, social activist and Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, is one of the nation’s leaders in opposing psycholo¬gist participation in torture and abuse. He will speak to the history of that struggle in the context of the broader struggle for human rights.

SPONSORS:

Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, Institute for the Study of Violence
Boston Institute for Psychotherapy
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Brookline PeaceWorks
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
First Parish of Brookline
Massachusetts Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology
Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis
Physicians for Human Rights
Psychoanalytic Institute of New England
Psychologists for Social Responsibility–End Torture Action Committee

Registration is not required but would help us anticipate attendance. If you are interested in attending this program, please email MLoug23@aol.com by Monday, April 28, 2008.

Download flyer here.

CONTINUING EDUCATION

The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) offers Continu¬ing Education for psychologists and social workers. MIP is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. MIP maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
For further information, please contact Mary Loughlin at (978) 692-4790.

Learning Objectives
1. Participants will gain a greater understanding of the way that torture affects all members of a society not just the tortured.
2. Participants will have deeper appreciation of how psychologists’ presence at Guantanamo endorses the United States government stance that torture is morally acceptable.
3 Participants will appreciate the importance of engaging political issues from multiple perspectives including ethical, emotional, spiritual and psychological.

Suggested Readings:
Fair, E. (2007, February 9). An Iraq Interrogator’s Nightmare.
Horton, S., & Rejali, D. (2008, February 13). Six Questions for Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’.
Physicians for Human Rights, & Human Rights First. (2007, August). Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality.
Soldz, S. (2007, April 13). Aid and Comfort for Torturers: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations in Historical Perspective.

5 comments March 23rd, 2008

Do “free markets” increase life expectancy disparities?

The New York Times today documents that the gap between rich and poor in the US involves not just income, but a growing disparity in life expectancy. Before people start complaining about Bush, not that the main data they present concerns the increase from 1980-1982, the beginning of the Reagan administration, to 1998-2000, the end of the Clinton administration. Presumably, Clinton’s free market ideology and policies contributed to the widening disparities.

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

by Robert Pear

New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

One of the researchers, Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers.

The gaps have been increasing despite efforts by the federal government to reduce them. One of the top goals of “Healthy People 2010,” an official statement of national health objectives issued in 2000, is to “eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population,” including higher- and lower-income groups and people of different racial and ethnic background.

Dr. Singh said last week that federal officials had found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.

While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:

¶Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.

¶Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.

¶Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.

¶Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.

In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” – what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.

Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.

“People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”

A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”

Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.

Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.

The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income.

1 comment March 23rd, 2008