The Single Worst Thing about America (and why opposing torture is courageous)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Our society is maintained through governmental threat of rape, beatings and murder.

That's what keeps the lid on here. Threatening people with rape.

A short humane prison term just isn't very threatening. You wouldn't want to lose years of your life but doing six months... If the threat was that I would have to work a menial job eight hours a day and quietly read, write or exercise the rest of the time for six months? Not my preference, but many people have taken more Spartan retreats voluntarily. Boot camp is tougher.

The reason people follow the law is that they perceive the alternative as being cast into actual Hell. And a Hell maintained intentionally by the government for the purpose of being a deterrent to crime. Prisons could be more or less humane if the government wanted them to be so however humane they are is intentional.

The threat is so ingrained that people routinely joke about prison rape. How odd... Any everyone gets the jokes, too. It is an ingrained societal control mechanism. (Of course prisons could be Disneyland if the public still believed them to be Hell, but the truth would get out pretty fast.)

When you consider that threat of mayhem, and specifically the threat of rape, is a key component of how we get people to pay their taxes and not write bad checks why shouldn't the average Joe think it's okay if some terrorist gets his head dunked to get intelligence from him?

This is a violent society. And some of it comes from the top.

When you maintain order with threat of rape and level whole neighborhoods overseas to seek individuals... it's surprising torture isn't even more accepted here.

(This came to mind in the context of a previous post saying Obama is courageous to oppose torture to the degree he has. Several replies noted the sad irony that simply following the law is courageous, but we all know it is. Opposing torture is a politically daring position and that got me thinking about why.)

[Hippo_Tron]

1. That and the fact that being an ex-convict is a black mark for the rest of your life

Nobody wants to hire an ex-convict.

[Occam Bandage]

2. I believe the claim that the government actively uses prison rape as a threat

is a bit of a stretch. A fair case could be made that the government does not particularly care about human rights abuses in its prisons, but claiming that prison rape is an encouraged and even necessary aspect of the criminal justice system as it stands seems to be bombastic and unsupported. Your justifications are, "The government could stop prison rape if it wanted to," and "prisons are obviously supposed to be unpleasant or there isn't a good deterrent effect." I don't think those add up to your thesis.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

4. no

Everything in society is interconnected. I don't hypothesize that a council sets optimal prison rape targets every year but what you identify as bombast is a homely statement of the obvious.

You cannot separate the publics (and politicians') disinterest in making prisons more expensive from the publics (and politicians') perception of the deterrent effect.

The people (en masse) make complex multi-axial decisions about every aspect of government.

I know what I'm saying is horrific but it shouldn't be controversial.

Are people aware of it? Yes, universally. Do they approve of it? Yes. This is something of a democracy. If it was a priority politicians could successfully run on it. We just finnished an election cycle. Did it come up? Abu Ghraib and Gitmo came up, but I don't remember any domestic prison discussion. (Which doesn't mean there isn't a white paper on a web-site somewhere. It's certainly not a pressing campaign issue.)

So the people approve of it as punishment, social control mechanism or (most likely) both.

To suggest that it is not maintained (through willful indifference, since everything in a demoracy has an element of will) as some combination of deterrent and punishment seems to me an impossible argument.

Would you consider it bombastic to say the government actively uses prison as a threat? I'll assume not. There is a thing called prison. It is controlled entirely by the government. It is used as a threat to maintain order. Do you suggest that unpleasant aspects of prison are not componants of the threat? (Like the policy that you can't leave whenever you want.)

There are "invisible hand" decisions made about sentences, conditions, legal procedure, etc.. And, since the government has no mind to read, I cannot separate indifference and intentional action in government policy. I consider them the same. (Unlike in an individual.) As Biden says, "Show me your budget and I'll tell you your values." Indifference to poverty is, to some degree, a control mechanism to keep wages low. Is that so controversial? It's pretty much the same thing.

That doesn't mean some villain is selectively pauperizing people to suppress wages. But it's a fair statement of a motive informing the system.

Poll the American people (men and woman alike) on what they find most fearful about prison and you know violence of all sorts (mayhem, murder and beatings were also mentioned) will be high on the list. So it is an undeniable element of deterent. Could it be greatly ameliorated? Obviously. Is it? No.

Maybe we are hanging up on some anthropomorphic thing... the government isn't a person so describing these things is tricky. We all ascribe motives to markets and dynamic systems but its' not literal.

Shrug. It seems pretty uncontroversial to me. Of course we all walk a certain line here, balancing the need for rational argument and vivid language. I believe what I said is quite literally true, phrased to convey the horror of the thing. If that's bombast, so be it.

[Condem]

3. Greed, Kurt_and _Hunter.

The absolute worst thing about America. It knows no bounds.