Eric Bogle: And the band played Waltzing Matilda
Support Our Troops! Bring Them Home! And take care of them!
Add comment May 26th, 2008
Posts filed under 'Culture'
Kirk Family: The Earnest Soldier
The Kirk Family is sending their song The Earnest Soldier, as a Memorial Day protest. Support Our Troops! Bring Them Home!
Our family wrote this song just before the Iraq war began. We chose to protest because we did not trust our country’s leadership. We did not believe in the war. This song was our first attempt to honor the soldiers who die in our name by opposing the people who sent them to fight.
Go listen and read the lyrics here.
Add comment May 26th, 2008
The Global War on Freedom, UK front arrests student for conducting his research
The Global War on Freedom has struck the UK front again. A graduate student at Nottingham University, Rizwaan Sabir, was arrested and held for six days because he downloaded an Al Qaeda manual from a US government web site for his research on Al Qaeda tactics. HJis friend, university staff member Hisham Yezza, whom Sabir had asked to print the 1,500 page manual to save costs, is scheduled to be deported to Algeria. If deported, Yezza is in danger of being detained and, possibly, tortured.
Here is a Guardian article. Below the article is a Press Release from concerned Nottingham students and faculty:
Student researching al-Qaida tactics held for six days
By Polly Curtis and Martin Hodgson
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.
The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.
Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir’s family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.
Dr Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at the university’s school of politics and international relations, said that Yezza is being held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre, due to be deported on Tuesday.
“If he is taken to Algeria, he may be subjected to severe human rights violations after his involvement in this case. He has been in the UK for 13 years. His work is here, his friends are here, his life is here.”
Of his detention, Sabir said: “I was absolutely broken. I didn’t sleep. I’d close my eyes then hear the keys clanking and I would be up again. As I realised the severity I thought I’d end up in Belmarsh with the nutcases. It was psychological torture.
“On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.”
Bettina Rentz, a lecturer in international security and Sabir’s personal tutor, said: “He’s a serious student, who works very hard and wants a career in academia. This is a great concern for our academic freedom but also for the climate on campus.”
Students have begun a petition calling on the university to acknowledge the “disproportionate nature of [its] response to the possession of legitimate research materials”.
A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of “material of this nature”. The spokesman said it was “not legitimate research material”, but later amended that view, saying: “If you’re an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn’t send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry.”
At its annual conference next week the University and College Union will debate a motion on “assaults on academic freedom by the DIUS [Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills]“. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the UCU, said: “If we really want to tackle problems like extremism and terrorism, then we need to be safe to explore the issues and get a better understanding. The last thing we need is people too frightened to discuss an issue or research a subject because they fear being arrested or reported.”
The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said: “The government does not want to or has never asked for staff or students to spy on their colleagues or friends. We want universities to work with staff and students on campus to isolate and challenge the very small minority who promote violent extremism.”
Sabir’s solicitor, Tayab Ali, said: “This could have been dealt with sensibly if the university had discussed the issue with Rizwaan and his tutors. This is the worrying aspect of the extension of detention [under the Terrorism Act]. They can use hugely powerful arrest powers before investigating.”
Press Release:
Contact: Sam Walton, 07948590262
From: a group of concerned students and academics at the University of
Nottingham.For immediate use, 24/05/08 SATURDAY
Notts Uni detainee innocent but still facing deportation
Hicham Yezza, a popular, respected and valued former PhD student and
current employee of the University of Nottingham faces deportation to
Algeria on Sunday 1st June. This follows his unjust arrest under the
Terrorism Act 2000 on Wednesday 14th May alongside Rizwaan Sabir and
their release without charge six days later.On his release Hicham was re-arrested under immigration legislation and,
due to confusion over his visa documentation, charged with offences
relating to his immigration status. He sought legal advice and
representation over these matters whilst in custody. On Friday 23rd May,
he was suddenly served with a deportation notice and moved to an
immigration detention centre. The deportation is being urgently
appealed.Hicham has been resident in the U.K. for 13 years, during which time he
has studied for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in
Nottingham. He is an active member of debating societies, a prominent
member of an arts and theatre group, and has been writing editorials for
the Student Peace Movement magazine for the last five years. He is well
known and popular on campus amongst the university community and has
established himself as a voracious reader and an authority on literature
and music. An application for British citizenship was underway, and he
had been planning to make his yearly trip to Wales for the Hay Festival
when he was suddenly arrested.Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at in the school of Politics and
International Relations says “This is a clear case of the police trying
to cover up their completely unjustified targeting of these two innocent
men by making Hicham look guilty by deporting him. Hicham is entirely
innocent and the rushed and heavy-handed way in which the authorities
are dealing with this matter is outrageous.”[ENDS]
Contact: Sam Walton 07814683906, samdreddude@hotmail.com; or Musab
Younis: 078901018073, musabz@gmail.com***************************
We’re focussing our campaigning on the following areas:
1) Lobbying the Home Office We have been made aware that a call from
an MP to the Home Office, in particular Liam Byrne, the relevant
minister, has the possibility to stop the deportation in its tracks. One
of our
major focuses is trying to get particular MPs to make this
representation. If the MPs we have close contact with are unsuccessful
in the immediate short term, we will be encouraging more and more people
to contact their MPs to make representations.Direct representations to the Home Office are presumably relevant as
well, as are representations to other parts of government (up to and
including Jacqui Smith, Gordon Brown etc.), which we will be pursuing if
our initial efforts are not successful.
-
please keep us informed of any such contact as we will be trying to keep
track of which MPs have been ‘lobbied’ and whether this has been
successful.2) Legal challenge The main legal avenue is to seek an injunction,
which would basically grant a stay of deportation. Whilst the cost of
this is minimal we are seeking to build up a legal fund as we anticipate
that future legal costs may mount. If an initial stay of deportation is
received it seems likely that there would be much more legal work to be
done to ensure Hicham’s release. Our understanding is that if Hicham’s
immediate deportation was stopped he would then have to face the
immigration charges.We are looking to get the best possible legal advice and would
appreciate any recommendations for relevant specialist solicitors that
may be available. That said we are receiving recommendations all the
time and have many avenues to explore through the experience of some of
our members in anti-deportation campaigns in relation to asylum.3) Media We are working to mount a coherent and sustained media campaign
and we’re already off to a flying start. We are seeking first to work
through known reliable journalists so that we get the right message out
first, before moving on to sending out press releases en masse. We would
very much appreciate contact details for journalists which people can
vouch for.We would appreciate help from yourselves in any way you feel possible.
However here are a few things we have thought of:First of all money to cover legal costs is a huge concern of us at the
moment. We would appreciate any contributions either from the Party
itself or personal donations and if you were able to spread this message
throughout the party we would be very grateful. We are in a situation
where even small amounts would make a real difference with the added
benefit that it is a clear demonstration of solidarity which will
inevitably boost moral and make a reality our aim of having the broadest
possible base of support.Also if sitting MEPs or councillors were able to use their positions in
any way to either make formal representations, or simply to raise the
profile of the campaign we would be very grateful. We are already
working on model motions and resolutions for unions and similar
organisations, which could also be used in councils or parliaments.Please send us any thoughts you have on these ideas and please pass on
this email address (staffandstudents@gmail.com) and our phone number
(07948 590262)
Add comment May 25th, 2008
Prison rape as American as cherry pie
More on the prison horrors we accept in our name. Ezra Klein writes in the LA Times of the cultural acceptance of prison rape. Apparently, it’s even the subject of video games. As Gandi supposedly said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization: “It would be a good idea.” Civilization begins with the closing of most of our prisons and jails and the radical reform of the remaining. Civilization is measured in how we treat the most despised.
[BTW, if you missed Craig Haney's piece I posted the other day, on our cultural acceptance of prison brutality and psychologists' failure to confront it, make sure and go read it. A Must Read!]
There’s nothing funny about prison rape
Smirking at sexual attacks on inmates makes us all less safeBy Ezra Klein
From the studio that brought you ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ ” intones the preview for the light comedy “Let’s Go To Prison,” “comes a penetrating look at the American penal system.” In case that was too subtle for you, the DVD box features a dropped bar of soap, just waiting for some poor inmate to bend over to pick it up — and suffer a hilarious sexual assault in the process.
Or maybe you’re not feeling up for a movie. It’s more of a board-game afternoon. How about picking up “Don’t Drop the Soap,” a board game created by the son of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. The game “is simply intended for entertainment,” said Nicole Corcoran, the governor’s spokeswoman. What, after all, could be more entertaining then trying to “avoid being cornered by the Aryans in the shower room” (one of the goals of the game, according to its promotional material)?
Here in Washington, however, the weather has been beautiful lately, so if you were bored last week, you might have wanted to do something out of the house. One option would have been going down to the Department of Justice, where, on the third floor, officials were holding hearings on prison rape, interrogating administrators from some of the worst prisons in the nation about the abuses that go on within their walls.
These hearings are held annually. This year’s transcripts aren’t online yet, but in 2006 you could have heard a man named Clinton explain, “I had no choice but to enter into a relationship with another inmate in my dorm in order to keep the rest of them off of me. In exchange for his protection from other inmates, I had to be with him sexually any time he demanded it. It was so humiliating, and I often cried silently at night in my bed … but dealing with one is better than having 10 or more men demanding sex from you at any given time.”
Clinton’s testimony wasn’t very funny, and it wasn’t for entertainment. Nor was the 2001 report by Human Rights Watch, “No Escape,” which included a letter from an inmate confessing that “I have no more feelings physically. I have been raped by up to five black men and two white men at a time. I’ve had knifes at my head and throat. I had fought and been beat so hard that I didn’t ever think I’d see straight again.”
Prison rape occupies a fairly odd space in our culture. It is, all at once, a cherished source of humor, a tacitly accepted form of punishment and a broadly understood human rights abuse. We pass legislation called the Prison Rape Elimination Act at the same time that we produce films meant to explore the funny side of inmate sexual brutality.
Occasionally, we even admit that prison rape is a quietly honored part of the punishment structure for criminals. When Enron’s Ken Lay was sentenced to jail, for instance, Bill Lockyer, then the attorney general of California, spoke dreamily of his desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ”
The culture is rife with similar comments. Although it would be unthinkable for the government today to institute corporal punishment in prisons, there is little or no outrage when the government interns prisoners in institutions where their fellow inmates will brutally violate them. We won’t touch you, but we can’t be held accountable for the behavior of Spike, now can we?
As our jokes and cultural products show, we can claim no ignorance. We know of the abuses, and we know of the rapes. Research by the University of South Dakota’s Cindy Struckman-Johnson found that 20% of prisoners reported being coerced or pressured into sex, and 10% said they were violently raped. In a 2007 survey by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 60,000 inmates claimed to have been sexually victimized by other inmates during the previous 12 months. Given the stigma around admitting such harms, the true numbers are probably substantially higher.
But by and large, we seem to find more humor than outrage in these crimes. In part, this simply reflects the nature of our criminal justice system, which has become decreasingly rehabilitative and increasingly retributive.
In the 1970s, as economist Glenn Loury has written, “the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there.”
On the campaign trail, Mike Huckabee put it even more pithily. “We lock up a lot of people that we’re mad at,” he liked to say. “Not the ones we’re really afraid of.” Criminals aren’t sent to prison so they can learn to live outside of prison; they’re sent to prison to get what they deserve. And that paves the way for the acceptance of all manners of brutal abuses. It’s not that we condone prison rape per se, but it doesn’t exactly concern us, and occasionally, as in the comments made by Lockyer, we take a perverse satisfaction in its existence.
Morally, our tacit acceptance of violence within prisons is grotesque. But it’s also counterproductive. Research by economists Jesse Shapiro and Keith Chen suggests that violent prisons make prisoners more violent after they leave. When your choice is between the trauma of hardening yourself so no one will touch you or the trauma of prostituting yourself so you’re protected from attack, either path leads away from rehabilitation and psychological adjustment.
And we, as a society, endure the consequences — both because it leads ex-cons to commit more crime on the streets and because more of them end up back to jail. A recent report released by the Pew Center on the States revealed that more than one in 100 Americans is now behind bars. California alone spends $8.8 billion a year on its imprisoned population — a 216% increase over what it paid 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.
That’s money, of course, that can’t be spent on schools, on job training, on wage supports and drug treatment. Money, in other words, that can’t be spent on all the priorities that keep people out of prison. Money that’s spent instead on housing prisoners in a violent, brutal and counterproductive atmosphere. And there’s nothing funny about that.
Ezra Klein is an associate editor at the American Prospect. His blog is at EzraKlein.com.
Add comment May 25th, 2008
Support our troops. Bring them home.
For Memorial Day. Don’t let more soldiers die in vain. And take care of them when they’re home.
Bruce Springsteen - Bring Them Home - San Francisco 2006:
Add comment May 25th, 2008
NYC 8th graders boycott standardized test, teacher fired
Any parent of a public school child or a teacher today knows that there are far too many standardized tests these days. While there is legitimate debate about the value of these tests (I actually support them when appropriately used),there can be little doubt that too much emphasis is placed upon them. They seem to have become the only goal of education. Other goals — like fostering love of learning, or creativity, or critical thinking, or acquiring the knowledge and and understanding required of an informed citizen — are quietly ignored in pursuit of better test scores, so that the school and teachers can look good.
Personally, I would love to be involved in an effort to develop an appropriate policy for use of standardized tests.
Meanwhile, 8th graders in a South Bronx middle school have had enough. Over 160 of them boycotted yet another practice test. The principal appears to have gone berserk, firing a social studies teacher for allowing open discussion in his class. If this account from the New York Daily News has any validity, there is an excellent teacher in NYC who must be rehired and a principal who should look for another line of work.
New York 8th-Graders Boycott Practice Exam But Teacher May Get Ax
by Juan Gonzalez
Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.
More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.
Instead, the students handed in blank exams.
Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.
“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”
According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”
School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.
The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.
A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”
The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.
This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”
“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”
Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.
Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.
Yes, he holds liberal views and is critical of the school system’s increased emphasis on standardized tests, Avella said, but the students decided to organize the protest after weeks of complaining about all the diagnostic tests the school was making them take.
“My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions,” Avella said. “I teach them critical thinking.”
“Some teachers implied our graduation ceremony would be in danger, that we didn’t have the right to protest against the test,” said Tia Rivera, 14. “Well, we did it.”
Lopez did not return calls for comment.
“This guy was far over the line in a lot of the ways he was running his classroom,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor. “He was pulled because he was inappropriate with the kids. He was giving them messages that were inappropriate.”
Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.
“Now they’ve taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies,” Tatiana Nelson said. “How does that help us?”
Add comment May 22nd, 2008
Haney: Statement on Psychologists, Detention Facilities, and Torture
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 95062All 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]
2 comments May 22nd, 2008
Cory Doctorow on the dangers of misunderstanding risk
Cory Doctorow, in the Guardian Comment is Free section has an important article on how people’s lack of understanding of statistics leads to danger as ineffective and potentially harmful means are used to fight against extremely rare events. He uses my favorite examples: parents fears of their children being attacked by strangers, and our fear of terrorist attacks. In both cases the fear leads to coping strategies that are at best ineffective and that have many harmful side effects. One factor he ignores, however, are the vested interests that fan and take advantage of these fears. Think of some of those “charities” making fortunes off of the fears of our children being kidnapped. [Lest I be misunderstood, I am NOT saying that all such charities are frauds, but that some are.] And, at this stage in our country we are well aware of the politicians, of both political parties, that fan fears of terrorism to create support for all kinds of useless or harmful measures.
Doctorow concludes:
If there’s one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it’s this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe.
While this is true, it would require government to forswear taking advantage of our lack of understanding. At present, that seems Utopian. There is, perhaps, a greater chance for academic institutions.
Here is the entire article:
The odds are stacked against us
by Cory Doctorow
The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when you flew to Las Vegas. You’d step out of McCarran airport, stare down the Strip at all those glittering, palatial casinos and say to yourself, “Holy crap – think of all the suckers who must have lost everything to finance this place!” Instead, our foolish minds are filled with thoughts like, “Man, look at all the money in this town – I’m going to win big!” And another casino is built.
The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it’s to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. As a new father, I’m understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator Out There, waiting to break in and take my child away. There’s a part of me who understands the panicked parent who rings 999 when he sees some street photographer aiming a lens at a kids’ playground.
But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent). If not a relative, then a close family friend. If not a close family friend, then a trusted authority figure.
And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack instead of protecting our children from the real, everyday dangers they face from the familiar. This has the twin effects of making our children less safe, and of making adults less free, because we are all subjected to scrutiny on the grounds that we may be hunting children.
This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables.
The everyday threat of having our goods stolen, our ability to travel and earn our livings curtailed, and our personal information harvested by every junior terrorist fighter who wants to see your ID before letting you do anything is overshadowed by the one-in-a-billion confluence of someone with terrorist goals, the means to accomplish them, and the intelligence to bring them off (hint: you can’t really blow up an airplane with hair-gel and iPods).
Paradox of the false positive
Our innumeracy means that our fight against these super-rarities is likewise ineffective. Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here’s how that works: imagine that you’ve got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that’s 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that’s what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there’s only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your “99% accurate” test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!
Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated “tests” for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.
In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we’re just making much bigger haystacks.
You don’t get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It’s something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there’s one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it’s this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe.
1 comment May 22nd, 2008
PEI Music: Cynthia MacLeod with Jeff Matheson
Cynthia MacLeod is one of the best Prince Edward Island fiddlers. I’ve seen her many times since seeing her with the incomparable Fiddlers’ Sons when she was 15. Here she is with Jeff Matheson on keyboard. The sound is not wonderful, but one can get a sense of her playing. To find out more go to cynthiamacleod.com:
Add comment May 21st, 2008
Over 100,000 executed by South Korea at advent of Korean War; Massacre denied for half a century
The Associated Press is reporting on recent revelations that early in the Korean War the South Korean government, with US acquiescence, murdered 100,000-200,000 of its citizens suspected of possible leftist sympathies. These executions occurred in scenes of mass death, with thousands of detainees lined up in front of trenches and shot, checked to make sure they were dead, and then pushed into mass graves and covered over.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century.
In recent years these mass graves have started to be excavated by a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission is also investigating hundreds of reports of American massacres of civilians, mainly through air strikes:
The 17 investigators of the commission’s subcommittee on “mass civilian sacrifice,” led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents — not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.
American military officials had control of the South Korean military and could have stopped the massacres but chose not to:
The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean “internal matter,” even though he controlled South Korea’s military.
Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.
The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.
White-clad detainees — bent, submissive, with hands bound — were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.
Trembling policemen — “they hadn’t shot anyone before” — were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.
Very important to keep in mind is that these crimes were vigorously denied by Korean and American officials for half a century. While many Korean family members of the executed and other knew of the murder of 100,000 of their citizens, they were too afraid of being labelled “leftist” to speak. In many cases they destroyed all pictures and other remnants of their dead family members to protect the family. Those who tried to publicly reveal the killings were harassed:
Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a “public secret,” barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.
“The family couldn’t talk about it, or we’d be stigmatized as leftists,” said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of families seeking redress for their loved ones’ deaths in 1950.
Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and “the leaders of those organizations were arrested and punished.”
Then, “from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try again to reveal these hidden truths,” said Park Myung-lim of Seoul’s Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.
The US and British government denied the reports and censored or attacked those few reporters and others who tried to reveal the massacres:
Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.
British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for London’s Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.
Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. Embassy in London as an “atrocity fabrication.” The British Cabinet then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, historian Jon Halliday has written.
Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later memoir he was “shocked that American officers were unconcerned” by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.
Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept secret for decades.
These incidents should remind us yet again, as if another reminder were needed, that war is always horrifying, that civilians are regularly considered enemies to be destroyed in modern warfare. the myth of the clean war is exactly that, a myth created to justify that which is unjustifiable. As one of the executioners described his thoughts as he finished off one victim who had survived the first shot:
I thought, there should never again be war.
Another lesson of these massacres and the ability of governments to suppress the knowledge of them for decades is that, when it comes to atrocities, governments lie. All governments lie. While this does not mean that all claims of atrocities are true, those who give credence to official denials, who treat those denials as “evidence”, as anything other than the propaganda they are, are themselves abetting the atrocities of the state. Only a truly inquisitive press and an aroused citizenry constitute a partial check of government denial and deceit. We should remember this elementary fact as we evaluate the many claims of atrocities in Iraq.
Blogger Valtin, who wrote about these massacres last night, has called for an American Truth & Reconcilliation Commission to investigate “full extent of U.S. involved war crimes.” I concur with this position. Only if our country somehow comes to terms with our role in many late 20th century horrors do we have a chance of choosing a different path. To stay on the path of denial is to remain in the service of death.
1 comment May 19th, 2008