The Iraqi tortures are an extension of the American justice system.

[kentuck]

Now, before you say that is going a little too far, take a moment to think of it. Police dogs are used whenever needed by our police forces. People are strip searched every day, sometimes innocently. People are abused by our police forces everyday and sometimes, as in the case of Rodney King, it is on film. Most of the time it is never documented. Of course, some would argue that Waco was a police force gone wild.

Even in Colorado Springs, there were a couple of deaths related to tying unruly prisoners to plywood boards, before it was reported and stopped. It happens everyday across America. Our police forces beat and abuse our citizens. For those that might argue it is not that bad, we would say that it is also not that good...

[Mikimouse]

1. What do you expect, from a nation of individuals...

who are addicted to things like Springer, and Prime Time Pigs. We are a nation of idiots who get our jollies from watching other people suffer more than we perceive ourselves to be. It is purely gladiatorial. The images that we are exposed to constantly, in terms of the glorification of the agents of social control, are astounding in their sycophancy, and the resul, in the long run, is that we internalize these things as normal behaviors. Before I get flamed for the above descriptions, I make the references to describe what I see on television (when I watch, which isn't often), and am appalled at the various shows that I see. Racism, jingoism and brutality are the hallmarks of our society.

[undergroundpanther]

2. We act like

A nation of bullies and bully enablers.
Until we can reject the lures of charismatic sociopaths in thier wants of power wealth and prestige and keep public/private positions of authority and delegation away from these kinds of immoral, dominating ,over-ambitious,narcissitic,deceptive bullying personalities..things won't change.
Bullies in social situations need to be recognized,not believed,not trusted or give creedence to thier self-serving claims of victimization bullies do when a person who was harmed speaks about the traumas they lived at the hands of a bully..When a bully chooses to abuse people or power they must hear how that abuse feels.Victims and thier stories of what occured must not be silenced or twisted for saving a bullies face if there is to be any justice in this life..

[opihimoimoi]

3. Its the Milgram experiment gone wild.

They found this out 50 years ago, that given authority, 60% of Americans will torture other Humans when ordered to by a higher up supervisor.

You would think there would be a movement to cure.minimize this aspect of our Society. We got seatbelts for our bodies/cars, where are the seat belts for our Brains.?

[Mikimouse]

5. Yep, and the even more interesting part of that work is...

that it was replicated by Asch using peer groups, and while the percentage dropped, there was still a large percentage that 'caved in' to group influences.

[QC]

6. Another interesting thing

is that the results were more or less the same even for different nationalities, professions, social classes, etc.

Milgram initially used Yale undergrads for the study, and he was told that they are more competitive than other people and that surely "regular folks" would yield different results. But they didn't.

[Mikimouse]

8. That is certainly true; moreover, the study by Garfinkel...

with the undergraduates at his institution provides even more insight into the lack of social class, and educational differentials, insofar as social definitions are concerned. (Sorry, I have forgotten where Garfinkel was at the time-don't tell my advisor).

[opihimoimoi]

9. If I recall, they repeated this in Europe where 85% went wild with

the button.

[QC]

4. Our prisons have long used rape as punishment.

It happens here every day.

In a study of Midwestern prisons, as many as one in five male inmates reported a pressured or forced sexual encounter, while one in ten male inmates reported having been raped. In a study of women’s facilities, reported rates of sexual assault ranged from 7% to as high as 27%.

http://www.spr.org/en/pressreleases/2003/1113.html

[Karenina]

7. They are also BIG BUSINESS.

The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, 2002

Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.

"It's a win-win," says Morgan. The INS is desperate for more beds for its ever expanding detainee population. And the state of Nebraska, collecting $65 per detainee per day from the INS, rakes in more than $1 million a year over and above the cost of running the place.

County jailers have long known that housing INS detainees pumps easy income into the coffers. Nearly 900 facilities around the country provide beds for the INS, and in interviews over the years, several county sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a "cash crop."

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.php

A very l-o-n-g and detailed oldy moldy from '02. Sorry no link.

Empty Promises
Missouri has been pouring millions into prisons that aren't being used. But stay tuned: If politicians have their way, there will be plenty of inmates to go around.

BY BRUCE RUSHTON

For them, prison construction in Missouri is an automatic case of "if you build it, they will come." By 2004, corrections officials predict, the state will run out of cells.
Not everybody believes it.

Take Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist. Rosenfeld is convinced the state has gone overboard. "Absolutely," he says. "Barring policy changes that I just don't see on the horizon, what will happen in Missouri is what we're beginning to see in many other places, and that is smaller and smaller growth rates and then, finally, a flattening. I would think that by 2004 they'll be flat."

During the second half of 2000, the number of inmates confined in state prisons nationwide dropped by half a percentage point, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the first decline in the prison population since 1972. In Missouri, the numbers are rising, but not nearly so fast as in the early and mid-1990s, when annual percentage increases reached double digits. Prison growth peaked in 1995, when the number of inmates increased by 15 percent in one year. Since 1997, annual growth has been less than 5 percent. The numbers work out to 3.3 new inmates per day over the past three years. When work started on Bonne Terre, the state was welcoming eight new inmates per day.

An end may be in sight. With crime rates falling since the early 1990s, inmates sent to prison for parole or probation violations are fueling the growth -- in 2000, 59 percent of all prison admissions were the result of parole or probation revocations. In most cases, parole or probation is revoked for technical violations, such as failing a drug test, as opposed to new crimes. Inevitably, Rosenfeld says, the numbers of probation and parole violators will decrease as sentences run their courses. Banking on repeat offenders to fill new prisons isn't a wise bet in Missouri, which, at 19.2 percent, has the sixth-lowest recidivism rate in the nation.

<snip>


So why is Missouri spending so much on new prisons with so little justification?

The simple answer is politics.


With an average sentence of seven years for a violent offense, Missouri is the toughest state in the nation when it comes to punishing dangerous felons. It's also tough on criminals who haven't hurt anyone.

More than half of the state's prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. "That's a pretty high percentage," says Chase Riveland, former director of the Washington Department of Corrections and now a prison consultant. "Legislators need to start looking at it as if they're investment bankers: Who is it we really want to spend the money on to keep them away from the community? If it's a person who's dangerous to other people, yeah, it's worth the investment. In the '80s and early '90s, incarceration was the solution for anything we saw awry in our society. We just put enormous numbers of people in, some of whom could have been dealt with differently and safely in the community. I would say, as an investment banker, we're making some poor investments."

<snip>


Inevitably the prison will open. It's just a question of when. "I can't imagine -- I can't imagine -- the state walking away from a commitment like that," the mayor says. Beyond that, the future is uncertain.


riverfronttimes.com | originally published: February 20, 2002

[Feanorcurufinwe]

10. It is indeed systemic.

Just look at the way police are trained to deal with issues of suspect rights, unlawful detention, excessive force, abuse of power -- the police are taught to follow the letter of the law, not the spirit. It becomes a game where they are always trying to walk as close to the line as possible.