At the American Psychological Association convention last August, I was on a panel nominally on the ethical dilemmas of working in detention centers. Also on the panel was former Guantanamo criminal investigator Michael Gelles well known to readers of this blog; Robert Kinsherff, forensic psychologist from Massachusetts; and Craig Haney, a psychologist t UC Santa Cruz who has spent decades studying conditions in US prisons. I had never met or read Craig before, but was blown away by his searing indictments of the US penal system, with its millions of convicts treated in the most barbaric manner, and of the American public who allowed, and even cheered on, this organized system of brutality.
Craig related Bush administration treatment of national security detainees to this climate, accepting, and even encouraging, brutality against those who are different.
I recently asked Craig for permission to post the text of his talk, which he graciously gave. It is my delight to post it here.
Statement on Psychologists, Detention Facilities, and Torture
Professor Craig Haney
Department of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California 95062
psylaw@ucsc.edu
All of us come to this issue through the prism of our own work. So my comments reflect the perspective of someone who has studied and monitored detention and prison conditions in the United States and other parts of the world for nearly 30 years, and who has looked at how the people who live and work in these places have been psychologically affected, and often morally compromised (or at least profoundly challenged) by the environments they inhabit (Haney, 2006).
However, I’d like to begin by broadening the discussion a little bit. I’d like to remind you of what-for lack of a better term-I’ll call the “ethical drift” that all of us (not just BSCT team psychologists) have been subjected to in the Orwellian world that we now live in.
Without detailing the many legal protections and civil liberties that have fallen by the wayside over the last 5 years, and the bizarrely twisted legal logic that has been used by in the Bush Administration’s attempts to justify all manner of cruel and inhumane treatment, let me simply acknowledge the obvious: that we are now living in a badly compromised ethical world, one in which everyday it seems we are treated to yet another revelation of governmental excess of some sort and all too frequent instances of people or policies crossing what were once seemingly inviolable legal lines or constitutional boundaries.
But to illustrate how much our moral universe has been degraded, let me turn to something much more basic than law-to language. Think of all the words that have only recently come into our lexicon over the last several years, words that either were literally unheard of until a short time ago, or words that have been redefined in bizarre ways and now emerge in seemingly serious discussions about what constitutes ethical behavior. Words and phrases like: evil doers; axis of evil; extraordinary rendition; black sites; ghost planes, ghost flights, and ghost detainees; BSCT teams; “reverse SERE” interrogations; “torture lite,” waterboarding, and “monstering;” “Gitmo-izing;” and Robotripping. On and on it goes.
And we-APA psychologists in this very debate-are directly implicated in this downward moral drift of the language we are all beginning to “get used to.” How many of us could envision 5 years ago that someday soon we would attend an APA annual convention where the main action and most vigorous debate focused on the question of whether psychologists should be allowed to participate in “torture”? Or that we would be so fully immersed in the ugly politics of the English language that we’d be laboring hard at the Orwellian task of parsing the exact meaning of “torture,” what specific acts it includes, what it doesn’t, exactly how close-in moral millimeters-psychologists should be allowed to get to the line of torture without actually going over it.
How much distance we have traveled, how much we have gotten used to, how far we have fallen.
But let me also suggest an alternative to the conventional account of how and why we have come so quickly to this dark place in our nation’s history and to such a humiliating moment in the history of our discipline. I frankly don’t think the ethical dilemmas we confront now as a society and as a discipline can be attributed entirely to 9-11 and the extraordinary-maybe even in part understandable- overreaction that our government had to the threat that 9-11 initially seemed to pose. I think instead that we had been prepared as citizens for a long time to react as we did-as, to a certain extent, at least initially, nearly all of us did. And the basis for this widespread reaction was rooted in domestic not foreign policy. That is, the road that has led us so directly to the morally compromised world we now inhabit was under construction for a very long time, in one sector of our society where civil rights have long been violated with impunity, and where people have regularly been subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment-in our criminal justice system.
Indeed, we have as a nation been reacting for a very long time to troublesome, inconvenient, threatening, and dangerous people inside our borders in one way and in one way only: by punishing them with unprecedented, increasingly unmitigated harshness- punishing them in deeply damaging ways and doing so with nary a concern for the psychological consequences that were being inflicted either on them, those connected to them, or the larger group of us who just got used to hearing about, if not actually seeing, it be done. The criminal justice system in the United States has become callously indifferent to the suffering of certain disfavored others over the last three decades and, along with it, so has the surrounding society. Our consciousness, our sensitivities, what we were willing to tolerate being done to others-indeed, to “the other“-have been shifted as a result.
Sadly, many courts also have dutifully followed suit, taking their lead from the very forces that politicized punishment in the first place, opting to stay out of the fray, frequently refusing to impose meaningful limits on the amount of pain that could be inflicted in the name of preserving civil order. Those of you who are looking to domestic U.S. law for guidance here-to the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, for example, as a way to insure humane treatment for detainees in the course of interrogation or confinement-are bound to be disappointed. When pain is made the very purpose of imprisonment, and criminal justice policies seek to spread it to as many corners of our society as possible, then few punishments are too cruel or too unusual as to be legally unacceptable.
Remember that before the war on terror there was the war on drugs, and before that the war on crime. What these previous wars meant mostly was a war on prisoners, which came increasingly to mean a war on persons of color, a generic war on troublesome threatening others, one fought by casting people out, demonizing them, referring to them as monsters and animals and superpredators and treating them as subhuman. That’s exactly what we as a society learned to do with the generic, threatening other over the last three decades and, for the most part, no one said a thing. No significant, identifiable constituency in the nation protested loudly enough to even precipitate a debate, and certainly no sub-group of this august organization (the APA), and certainly not the organization itself, fought meaningfully to reverse these trends.
As a country, we passed laws that doubled or tripled and doubled again the rate of incarceration in the United States, so that we far outstripped literally every other nation on the planet in this regard. And no one said a thing. Decades ago we began to incarcerate African Americans in this society at a rate that far exceeded the rate of incarceration of Blacks in South Africa and we still do. And no one said a thing. We abandoned long-held principles of juvenile justice and began increasingly to prosecute and punish children as harshly as if they were adults. And no one said a thing. Someone else’s children, to be sure, someone else’s problem.
What some criminologists termed the “mean season of corrections” was ushered in, in the late 1970s, as we directed what another scholar called “malign neglect” toward primarily African American men, but hundreds of thousands of others were caught up in it as well. This meanness has been with us ever since. In the state of California, to take just one local example, virtually every prison in the state holds literally twice the number of prisoners it was designed to house, prisoners sleep in gymnasiums converted to dormitories or on the floors of hallways. They get no real training or rehabilitation to prepare them for their eventual release, most of them get substandard medical and mental health care, if they get any at all, and each year tens of thousands are released back to the streets, most assuredly worse off than they went in. And, for the most part, no one has said a thing. The chaos and dysfunction brought about the overwhelming numbers of returning casualties from the war on crime has pushed many communities past the tipping point, and many urban sociologists believe these places may never recover from the scorched earth policies of mass incarceration to which their residents were and are being subjected. And no one has said a thing.
Once you begin to think of the world as composed of people who are part of the human community and people who are not, to react with extreme punitive harshness toward those whom you have placed outside its boundaries, to demonize rather than to understand them, then a powerful psychological process is set in motion that eventually leads to exactly the place we now find ourselves. But, as I say, we have been on this path for a long time. It is not surprising that when we finally realized that we had come to the logical but unanticipated extreme endpoint in this process-trying to decide whether and how we could participate in the torture of other human beings, we were hard pressed to know what to do or where to draw the lines.
And without wishing to offend some of my psychologist colleagues, it is important to acknowledge that many of them have participated, actively or passively, in furthering many of these degrading and dehumanizing punitive trends. There are psychologists all across the country whose job is to sign off on these extreme levels of psyche- and soul- and family- and community-destroying levels of prison punishment. And sign off they do.
I have clients who have been kept in punitive segregation in Louisiana for 35 years, living their lives inside the confines of an isolation cell not too much bigger than a kind-sized bed, except for the hour or so a day they are allowed to venture beyond its confines. Thirty-five years living like this. But no prison psychologist has seen fit to protest this inhumane treatment. In fact, quite the contrary, every 90 days one or another psychologist dutifully examines them and dutifully signs off on their continued isolation. I’ve had scores of mentally ill clients in Texas who deteriorated so badly under conditions of isolation that they regularly smeared themselves with feces and I could be hear them banging their heads against the walls of their cells or the steel cell doors as I walked up to visit them. No prison psychologist protested this treatment or demanded that these men be released from this horribly inhumane form of confinement. I have had thousands of clients in the close management units in the Florida prison system who, in addition to the severe, debilitating forms of isolation to which they were exposed, were prohibited from talking to one another, from one cell to the next. If they violated this prohibition they were pepper sprayed by prison staff, who sometimes would put a blanket over the rear window of their cells so that the gas would linger longer in the air. Some of the men could neither read nor write which meant that, when they were denied the opportunity to talk like this, they were literally denied the opportunity to communicate with other human beings at all. They were kept under conditions like these for years on end. No prison psychologist to my knowledge lodged a complaint over these and other related brutal practices, threatened to quit in the face of them, or took steps designed end them.
I could go on with countless examples from a vast parade of horribles at my disposal but I won’t. Suffice it to say that there has been precious little evidence inside the worst prisons and most abusive detention centers inside the United States that the presence of psychologists has done anything significant to consistently ameliorate or soften the harsh forms of inhumane treatment that have become all too commonplace there.
Let me hasten to add that I do not believe that this is so because the psychologists who work in these facilities and around these inhumane practices are morally or ethically deficient, callous, or uncaring people, or unprofessional or ill-trained in their craft. But there’s the rub, one that makes the challenge much more not less difficult to overcome. These awful things happen on a too regular basis because harsh and punitive prisons and detention facilities are inherently morally disengaging environments. Psychologists and others who work in them inhabit a morally ambiguous gray area where they are not only beholden to the people who employ them and, quite simply, required to comply, to follow their orders, but also because they are shaped gradually but inexorably, in Milgram-like 15 volt increments, into the worst operating assumptions of the institution and adapt to places where they simply must adhere to the powerful demands of the potent psychological environment that surrounds them.
There are many specific components of these environments that undermine the ethical behavior of psychologists or anyone who enters them. Let me just address a few.
The observation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a psychological as well as political truism. In prison environments, the custody and security staff have near total control over prison routines, the conditions of confinement that are created inside, literally every aspect of a prisoner’s existence, including every dimension of their treatment and potential mistreatment. This is the core dynamic of a prison and, if left unchecked, its polarizing tendency becomes more and more extreme and abusive. Moreover, in these polarized, antagonistic environments, you are either on one side of this power dynamic or the other; no one occupies the middle ground for very long. This means that psychologists must align themselves with the all powerful custody staff, or they have no power at all. As a result, in the very worst prisons, a largely powerless and voiceless group of prisoners is subjected to often unregulated and extreme forms of domination and control by what they perceive to be the entire staff, including the psychological staff. Unchecked domination and control leads invariably to degradation, humiliation, deliberate indifference, cruel and unusual punishment, and, yes, even to torture.
Incidentally, in most maximum security prisons where prisoners are being subjected to especially cruel conditions and other forms of mistreatment, prisoners are acutely aware of the morally ambiguous role of psychologists and they are not especially sympathetic to it. Indeed, some of the deepest anger and heartfelt recriminations are reserved for mental health staff who appear to be complicitous in the prisoners’ mistreatment, if only in the passive sense of appearing to sympathize with them but ultimately doing nothing to improve their conditions of confinement or prevent their abuse. Prisoners see this and, as a result, often regard the mental health staff with the greatest contempt, greater even than the contempt they direct toward the guards who, after all, don’t usually pretend to be anything or anyone else.
Of course, prisons and detention centers come with an overarching rationale or ideology to that justifies the inequalities of power and the enforced deprivation to which prisoners are subjected, an ideology in which persons are defined as fundamentally “other,” dehumanized and degraded and demonized so that they are seen as essentially different and often as dangerous-thus, they are labeled and regarded as bad, vile, untrustworthy, dangerous, psychopaths, the worst of the worst, as evildoers, or godless, or satanic or otherwise just “not like us.” The fundamental fact or fiction of their essential difference comes to represent them and to organize the mindset of the people charged with the responsibility of keeping them captive. This allows the compassion and empathy that would otherwise be extended to persons who are held in degraded conditions, who are in crisis or in need, anguish or desperation to be suspended, so that their pain not only does not register but becomes something that they have earned, asked for, or otherwise deserve. And the greater and long-lasting the abuse to which they are subjected, the greater the need and tendency to rationalize their mistreatment.
In their degraded state, brought about by the deprived circumstances under which they live and their absolute dependency on their captors, much of the prisoners’ humanity is suppressed, hidden, shielded from view, or disfigured. It is hard for prisoners to initiate behavior at all in these places, let alone to act and represent themselves as full human beings with true personhood and multidimensional pre-prison lives and relationships. To be sure, there is nothing in the day-to-day limited and contorted interactions they have with guards and other staff to remind those in charge of who they really are or were. A self-fulfilling prophecy is created in which guards see prisoners acting in precisely the degraded terms and within the narrow dehumanized constructs that have been assigned to them, confirming their disparaging views, and justifying-even escalating-their mistreatment.
A truly bad prison is typically brought about when those in charge operate oblivious to the potential for abuse; that is, to fail to prepare for and constantly safeguard against the prison’s inherently destructive capacity. Thus, these places are characterized by a chronic lack of training-a lack of the kind of meaningful, ongoing training that sensitizes staff to the negative changes they are at risk of undergoing. Line staff learns to fear and manage the enemy prisoners under their control, but rarely to fear and manage the institutional forces that threaten to overwhelm them in a different but no less destructive way.
Environments plagued by occasional instances of abuse are separated in another way from those in which extreme and pervasive abusive patterns of behavior develop, and in which an atmosphere of inhumane treatment is allowed to normalize and rigidify into a culture of harm. These kinds of malignant institutions are created when they are defined explicitly as times and places where ordinary rules and norms and standards of decency do not and should apply because of the urgency or exigency of the situation-a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on gangs, a war on terror-so laws and rules and norms governing what is legal, what is proper, what is decent are suspended rather than enforced and you are, in very real sense, free to create your own. Places of what Susan Opotow would call “moral exclusion” are created, alternative moral universes that are free of the ethical norms of the larger society, with no accountability to those norms.
Moreover, in order for what has been called the “suspension of the ordinary rules of decency” to succeed, mechanisms of outside monitoring, whether by the press, by lawyers, by human rights organizations-all of whom bring a fundamentally different perspective to bear on what is proper, correct, and humane-are denied access to the institution, and so that the reality that is created inside is immune from critical evaluation, challenge, and debate, and exempted from normal forms accountability, and from every having to justify the destructive norms that have been created inside.
So this is why psychologists and others so often behave badly inside poorly run punitive prisons. Once we begin to see the intended target of our skill and insight as our enemy, as an object to be manipulated, undermined, destroyed, then we have crossed an ethical line from which there is no return. In contexts like the ones I have described, I believe it is simply impossible for psychologists to consistently and ethically participate in any way in interrogations of persons who are being held indefinitely, without rights or charges, that take place inside military detention facilities that are themselves of questionable legality, that often exist in secret locations, where interrogation practices are employed that are so clandestine-literally “unspeakable”-that lawyers are barred from ever meeting their clients lest the practices be revealed, practices that are implemented by persons whose identities of course cannot be disclosed.
Indeed, the notion that psychologists can do more good than harm by working in these awful places-places where we have no real power to change them-I’m afraid seems simultaneously naïve and arrogant. Naïve about the power of the forces unleashed in these environments and their capacity to change and distort virtually everyone in their wake, arrogant about the profession and about the professionals themselves-believing that good, strong, properly educated people-APA members to be sure-will be able not only to withstand these pressures but to transform the very environments that are generating them. If my own past 30 years of experience studying the worst of these places provided me with examples of psychologists doing that, I would gladly share them with you. I cannot.
And certainly nothing that I know about Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, or any one of the unnamed sites around the world where there is good reason to believe forms of institutionalized torture are taking place leads me to expect anything different there. No, there is no other alternative but for APA and the rest of us to acknowledge what we should already know: that there is simply no reason to expect that the presence of psychologists during “enhanced” interrogations where techniques condemned by the rest of the world as clearly constituting torture can reliably reduce or restrain the inevitable harm and excess. It is now time for this organization to say clearly and without qualification what should have been said much earlier: psychologists must not participate in any way this odious and unethical behavior.
Reference:
Haney, C. (2006). Reforming punishment: Psychological limits to the pains of imprisonment. Washington, DC: APA Books.
[Annual American Psychological Association Convention, Session 7: Monday, August 20, 2007, 10-11:50 AM, Moscone Center, San Francisco]
