Digby speculated yesterday that America's extreme incarceration rate may explain our collective lack of concern about the plight of the people at Guantanamo who are being imprisoned indefinitely in conditions that border on torture, without trial or any hope of one.
I agree, but I think it also goes further. There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn't deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.
Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our views of criminal punishment. America has the distinction of being one of the very few modern industrialized democracies to retain capital punishment. We have some of the world's longest prison sentences.
Most bizarre, however, is our tolerance for prison rape and other abuse. Other countries take the care of prisoners much more seriously than does the U.S. In fact, prison rape in America has become a routine subject of mainstream comedy. Where it's not joked about, it's utilized as part of the punishment disincentive for crime, even by respected progressive allies. When Taibbi jokes about the supposedly salutary effect of throwing Blankfein in "pound-me-in-the-a** prison" (itself a reference to a line in the comedy Office Space), it plays on this same dynamic: the idea that prisoner abuse is all part of the just desserts of the wrongdoer and a lesson to others. Taibbi would doubtless object (and correctly so) that all he meant was for Blankfein to receive the same treatment as any other felon--but the point remains that to even mention such a thing is almost uniquely American.
It's shared across political lines and woven into our culture as a country, for better and (I believe) very much for the worse.
It's not surprising that we have high tolerance for depraved treatment of foreign prisoners suspected of terrorism. We have a similarly high tolerance for depraved treatment of our fellow Americans locked up for petty crimes. The abuses at Guantanamo are uniquely awful in their Kafkaesque unconstitutionality and maddening sensory deprivation. But least they know they're protected from one another, which is more than one can say for the inmates at your local penitentiary.
In America, once we lock people up, we seem to have no problem throwing away every last shred of their dignity.
by David Atkins, Hullabaloo | Read more:
I agree, but I think it also goes further. There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn't deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.
Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our views of criminal punishment. America has the distinction of being one of the very few modern industrialized democracies to retain capital punishment. We have some of the world's longest prison sentences.
Most bizarre, however, is our tolerance for prison rape and other abuse. Other countries take the care of prisoners much more seriously than does the U.S. In fact, prison rape in America has become a routine subject of mainstream comedy. Where it's not joked about, it's utilized as part of the punishment disincentive for crime, even by respected progressive allies. When Taibbi jokes about the supposedly salutary effect of throwing Blankfein in "pound-me-in-the-a** prison" (itself a reference to a line in the comedy Office Space), it plays on this same dynamic: the idea that prisoner abuse is all part of the just desserts of the wrongdoer and a lesson to others. Taibbi would doubtless object (and correctly so) that all he meant was for Blankfein to receive the same treatment as any other felon--but the point remains that to even mention such a thing is almost uniquely American.
It's shared across political lines and woven into our culture as a country, for better and (I believe) very much for the worse.
It's not surprising that we have high tolerance for depraved treatment of foreign prisoners suspected of terrorism. We have a similarly high tolerance for depraved treatment of our fellow Americans locked up for petty crimes. The abuses at Guantanamo are uniquely awful in their Kafkaesque unconstitutionality and maddening sensory deprivation. But least they know they're protected from one another, which is more than one can say for the inmates at your local penitentiary.
In America, once we lock people up, we seem to have no problem throwing away every last shred of their dignity.
by David Atkins, Hullabaloo | Read more:
