by Patricia Lee Sharpe
Ever since the Abu Graib disclosures and the revelation that prisoners were also mistreated at U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, I have been suffering a crisis of confidence, a kind of identity crisis, which doesn’t seem to be shared by enough Americans to make a difference. Recent news stories from Ohio and New Mexico aren’t helping me feel better.
Here’s one item. It has to do with the way people in prisons get treated, especially now when Americans are more interested in retribution than in rehabilitation. This particular reference comes from an editorial in the April 16th Santa Fe, NM daily New Mexican.
Having observed that “privatized prisons” are in the business of “profiting in human misery,” the editorial writer rejoices that Santa Fe county’s “private-jail experiment is mercifully at an end.” Why? Private contractors make a low ball pitch to manage incarceration for a budget-pinched local government--and then reality sets in:
They might get by for a while with low wages and other cost-cutting, but they discover that some of their bargain-basement employees lack not only [the] minimal qualifications public officials demand, but also much of an esprit de corps.Work gets sloppier–and in the case of a jail, that can be fatal: At our jail, an inmate hanged himself and died while guards, who were on notice that he was a suicide risk, were supposed to be monitoring him.
Last June an inmate was murdered. Another claimed that a couple of jailers had beaten and kicked him. Strip searches, already ruled unconstitutional, drew other complaints, as have medical conditions and even basic administrative details.
But de-privatizing doesn’t guarantee good treatment. Anyone reading this item will by now have remembered countless newspaper stories about sadistic and negligent prison management in the U.S. Either the guards beat up on the prisoners, or they turn their backs and allow the law of the jungle to operate behind bars–like higher ups who made sure they didn’t see too much of what was going on at Abu Graib.
Conclusion: what happened to prisoners detained by the U.S. military after 9/11 occupies the extreme end of a continuum, but it’s not wholly inconsistent with normal prison management. It’s the way we do things in America, evidently. Not a pretty picture. But most people don’t seem to care how prisoners are treated.
Here’s another story that caught my eye last week, another picture of sadism, callousness and institutional negligence, but from a high school in Columbus, Ohio. The story surfaced in the Columbus Dispatch. This version comes from the April 13th New York Times coverage:
A high school principal in Columbus, Ohio, has been fired and three assistant principals suspended without pay because they failed to notify the police last month about accusations that a 16-year old special education student had been sexually assaulted in the school auditorium by a group of boys, one of whom video-taped the attack....
The principal and her assistants not only failed to report the incident but also urged the girl’s father to avoid calling the police out of concerns that news reporters would become aware of the assault....The school principal and vice principals defended the attempted cover up by insisting that the video showed there had been “no coercion,” but they seem to have misread their supervisor’s mind. The school superintendent accused them of demonstrating “disregard for the victim’s safety and lack of sensitivity” and relieved them of responsibility.One witness’s statement said a boy pulled the girl onto the auditorium stage, ordered her to be quiet, pushed her to her knees and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
“If you scream, I’ll have all my boys punch you,” the boy told her and then punched her in the face, causing her mouth to bleed....
The girl told a special-education teacher minutes after the incident.....Another special-education teacher...told investigators that administrators did not call the girl’s father immediately after learning about the attack, [and when she herself] took it upon herself to call the father, an assistant principal urged him not to go to the school to pick up his daughter until after the end of the school day, “to avoid a confrontation with the suspects”....
When the father arrived, he asked whether the school administration was going to call the police. [The assistant principal]said, “No, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want the police.” The father then stepped into the hallway and called the police on his cellphone.
Fortunately, the superintendent of schools for Columbus was prudent and maybe even intentionally humane, but I find myself wondering what those boys had been learning at home, on the sports field, in church? Not good sportsmanship, fair play, how to protect the weaker members of society. They had acquired a disgusting sense of entitlement from some attitudinal substrate on which the principal and her minions had also counted in not calling the police right away to report an assault, a crime.
The Columbus incident reminded me of another gang rape that hit the national news over the last year or so. It happened in a “respectable” suburb in northern New Jersey, where the community rallied to the defense of the local high school football “heros,” who had ravished and sodomized (with a broomstick) a mentally retarded girl. As far as the community was concerned, the boys just got carried away and shouldn’t have been subjected to serious legal proceedings. And besides, so the defense went, the sordid business was consensual, as if, when a victim is retarded (and the boys knew this), real consent is possible. Unlike the members of that community, most people get upset when a cat torments a wounded bird!
The shocking point here is not the statistical likelihood that America, like any other country, can breed a few adolescent monsters. The point is that high school officials, or even whole communities of supposedly responsible adults, were not automatically, thoroughly sickened and aghast at the victimizing of handicapped young women.
That is why I am feeling pretty bereft at the moment.
Call it naiveté, but I have always criticized the U.S., often harshly, with the underlying belief that we Americans are, at heart, pretty decent, that there are things we do not condone as a society, things that we do not tolerate. Torture, for instance. Torture is medieval, barbaric, inhuman, prima facie evidence of a regime with no credibility whatsoever. (Useless, too, since experts in such things declare, with near unanimity, that confessions extracted under torture are nearly always unreliable.)
So, when Abu Graib broke, I expected officialdom, from the president on down, to declare that the the U.S. does not torture, period, and that the torturers must have been bad apples. The latter they did, of course. But only to protect themselves, the apple growers. For we have now discovered that the Bush administration (with a little help from the Clinton administration) has cooked the books in such a way as to make torture possible, even while the chief executive and others may hold out their palms to show that their own hands are clean–like Pilate’s.
That’s bad enough.
What has really shaken my confidence is this: there has not been an instant, sustained and universal grassroots shout of “Stop it! Stop it right now!” On principle. Because Americans don’t do that.
It’s not that Americans don’t know has been going on. The media coverage may not have been ideal, in all cases, but enough information was out there to have triggered a massive howl of public distress. Instead, only a few yelps.
Which means I have to do a little searching into the American psyche.
I find myself thinking of fraternity (sometimes sorority) initiations–secret, sadistic, humiliating, sometimes fatal. Mainstream behavior. I think of the marine boot camp parody that has been adopted for the purpose of reclaiming wayward teenagers, a body-crippling, spirit-breaking process. I think of the vicious playground bullying that makes school life hell for many children. Yet, as research done at the Wellesley Centers for Women shows, many school administrators (and no doubt that high school principal in Columbus)shrug off all bullying as just-kids stuff. Put such instances together and it’s hard not to suspect that there is something very rotten at the core of American life: the ritualization, even normalization of humiliation and pain to induce conformity in a society which (self-deludedly, it seems) regards itself as individualistic.
Things get worse.
I find myself recalling the long decades during the last century when the lynching of uppity or sexually-threatening blacks was formally criticized but actually condoned. Lynch mobs were so bold they took pictures of themselves and the victim. (Recall the videotapes at the Columbus high school and the photos from Abu Graib.) Today the lynch mobs' quarry has changed. Gays pose the “threat” to the social order, but "examples" are still made by posses of white males who are aren't exactly making it in the modern world. Once upon a time the “respectable” part of the community passed laws to keep black germs off drinking fountains. Now they protect marriage. Then and now, lynchers demonstrate their manhood by putting the fear of god into the vermin.
Bad apples? Afraid not. There seems to be a permanent mean streak in the American character, a tendency to label some sub-group as less than human, as fair game, as targets to pick on, to harass, to rape, to kill: blacks, gays, the handicapped, the incarcerated, Arabs, Muslims.
Maybe we Americans aren’t as nice as I have wanted to believe.
Who’s next?