The Bush administration's post-9/11 torture program (which was briefly back in the news this week due to the death of Dick Cheney, and the various obituaries that were published afterward to chronicle his career and try to assess his legacy) was surely among the low points of my lifetime, when it comes to U.S. human rights abuses.
From the standpoint of the human rights campaigner, however, it at least had the advantage of being a specific policy. It therefore could be reversed. It could be seen as a temporary aberration. And one could measure progress against it. When the Obama administration took power and rescinded the torture memos (even though they kept up many other abuses of power under the War on Terror), one could notch a victory. At least we knew that one awful moral blot on our history was behind us.
What in some ways disturbs me even more—then—is the torture that is inflicted on people in prisons and police custody throughout this country that is not a matter of official policy. The torture that is not a temporary aberration—but a routinized part of standard interrogation or incarceration practice: The police department that applies the third degree to every criminal suspect until they confess, say; just so they can close the books on a case and tell the public they solved it. Or the prison guards who routinely beat new inmates into submission; or look the other way at rampant sexual violence in their facilities.
Precisely because these forms of torture are officially unlawful—precisely because they do not occur as a matter of overt policy, then, and are not sanctioned in formal legal memos from the Justice Department—they are much harder to combat than the sort of evil yet completely formalized torture program the Bush-era CIA undertook.
Part of the problem is that it's impossible to know how prevalent these practices even are. I, like most comfortable white Americans who have minimal interactions with the criminal legal system, often vaguely imagine they are things of the past. Brutal police interrogation tactics are the sort of thing I associate with cynical 1970s crime movies; the mistreatment of prisoners is something I assume was solved after the Attica riots. Didn't we have policies and laws at some point to fix these things? Surely such practices belong now merely to the benighted past.
But occasionally—unmistakable evidence of all-too-contemporary police brutality breaks into the public consciousness—like the beating of a state prisoner in New York that was recently caught on video (and for which no guard was punished). And one always wonders, when one sees these stories: is this just the tip of the iceberg? How naive have I been, all my life? The guards certainly made it sound like such beatings were routine: "We are going to show you how we do it up in Sullivan," they had reportedly told him. Then, days later, he was roused out of his cell; his face smashed and bloodied; his dignity and his body violated; his rectum penetrated; and more.
The guards, of course—who faced no consequences for this abuse, following an internal investigation that cleared them of wrongdoing—claimed that their mistreatment of Ernastiaze Moore was wholly proportionate and justified. They were called to his cell because he supposedly had a knife (though no knife was found). They had to grope his anal cavity because they had seen a "string" dangling there, and thought he must be hiding something (no contraband was found either).
But you can watch the whole encounter on the New York Times page linked above. And nothing about the prisoner's conduct suggests he was actually a threat. The advantage of force is overwhelmingly on the guards' side. In the video, we see a group of white officers wearing tactical gear and heavy armor. They pepper spray the prisoner (an unarmed Black man) and drag him into the hallway without the least evidence of resistance on his part. They surround him against a wall, and do something that we can't see. Then, when he is peeled away from its surface—streaks of blood are visible.
Lines from Langston Hughes come to mind: I looked and I saw / That man they call the Law. / [...] I had visions in my head / Of being [...] murdered / By the third degree. / [...] The Law raised up his stick / And beat the living hell / Out of me! / Now, I do not understand / Why God don’t protect a man / From police brutality. / Being poor and black, / I’ve no weapon to strike back / So who but the Lord / Can protect me?
Gore Vidal, in a 2001 essay, suggests that it is a pure illusion on comfortable white America's part to assume that such incidents of police brutality are isolated aberrations. "It is no secret that American police rarely observe the laws of the land when out wilding with each other, and as any candid criminal judge will tell you, perjury is often their native tongue in court," he writes.
And indeed, if we're wondering how police or prison brutality could still be so common in this day and age—we should perhaps look no further than our own pop culture. Here we see that comfortable white America has no right to be shocked to hear that police routinely plant false evidence, lie on the stand, brutalize suspects, or otherwise violate people's legal rights. After all, we've spent decades valorizing exactly that behavior in our media. What trope is more common—or more glorified—on TV than the "loose cannon" policeman who breaks all the rules? (I couldn't keep going with the show The Shield, for instance, after it became obvious, a few episodes in, that the writers had fallen in love with their own crooked cop protagonist—even though the pilot episode clearly intended him originally to be the bad guy.)
All throughout my adolescence, too, people in mainstream culture found it normal to "joke" about prison inmates being raped—as if sexual torture was something we saw as a standard part of a judicial sentence. Gore Vidal—in another essay from the same collection—cites an incident in which the attorney general of California threatened to "personally escort" the CEO of a company they were prosecuting to a cell in which a "tattooed dude" would address him as "honey." Vidal quoted a summary of the implications of this incident from a British journalist: "The senior law official in the state was confirming (what we all suspected) that rape is penal policy. Go to prison and serving as a Hell's Angel sex slave is judged part of your sentence."
No wonder so many police and prison guards seem to feel they can beat and torture and sexually violate people with impunity. For decades, our media and political culture has told them time and again that it is prepared to wink and look the other way if they do so—indeed, that it smiles upon this kind of abuse. (Donald Trump has himself used his platform as president to laughingly endorse police violence, and has egged on officers in public speeches to be more brutal.)
And indeed, why should any of this surprise us in turn? We live in a society where a substantial part of the population subscribes to a theology whereby "ninety per cent of their contemporaries are designated for an eternal super-Auschwitz by their loving Father in Heaven," as Arthur Koestler once put it. If all these good, upstanding fellow citizens of ours can go about their lives without being troubled particularly at the thought that most of the people they see around them will spend an eternity of unspeakable torment in hellfire—why should they spare a thought for the merely temporal torment of countless defenseless civilians being beaten or raped right now in prisons and police stations throughout this great land?
Or why should they care about the 250 Venezuelan men—mostly asylum-seekers or random immigrants just trying to survive by delivering pizzas or driving for Uber, who had no criminal ties whatsoever—whom the Trump administration kidnapped off the streets and sent for months—without charge or trial—to be confined without access to their lawyers or relatives or any hope of future release in a secret prison in El Salvador, where a prison guard nicknamed "Satan" rattled the bars every night, and the men's captors proudly boasted to the inmates that they had entered "Hell," from which there was no possible escape except "in a body bag"?
Since innumerable members of our fellow citizens have been clubbed over the head from childhood with a theology that tells them this is exactly what God does to his own creatures—if they be unfaithful—and since so many ordinary Americans have had to numb their own consciences and capacities for empathy or reflection in order to swallow this abhorrent doctrine—then why should any of the horrors our government inflicts on people in this world trouble them particularly?
Indeed, when I "think of men as innocent as I am," as Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote, "Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars [...] Because of the unconcern of men and women / Respectable and respected and professedly Christian / [...] I am suddenly completely bereft, / Of [the great friendship of created beings] / The unity of life which can only be forged by love."
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