Gated Society: The U.S. Love Affair with Incarceration, Solitary Confinement & Torture - By S. Brian Willson

Gated Society: The U.S. Love Affair with Incarceration, Solitary Confinement
& Torture - By S. Brian Willson

May 29th, 2013

I live in a country (the USA which in mid-2011 had 311,800,000 people) that
imprisons more than 2.5 million of its citizens on an average day in more
than 9,000 jails and prisons, boasting the highest per capita detention rate
in the world by far - 800 prisoners for every 100,000 people {Local jails:
785,556 [Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, March 31,
2009]; state and federal adult prisons: 1,610,584 [Bureau of Justice
Statistics, US Department of Justice, March 31, 2009]; juvenile facilities:
79,166 [Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of
Juveniles in Residential Placement, February 24, 2010]; immigrant detention:
33,400 [ACLU: Immigration Detention, May 8, 2014]; and Indian Reservation
Jails: 2,364 [Bureau of Justice Statistics , US Department of Justice, Jails
in Indian Country, 2012]= Grand Total: 2,511,070 US prisoners on an average
day}. Rwanda has the second highest detention rate at 595; Russia comes in
third at 568. The world's average per capita detention rate is 146. [World
Prison Population List, 9th Editon, Roy Walmsley, International Centre for
Prison Studies].

More than 60 percent of US prisoners are from racial and ethnic minority
groups ["Rate of Incarceration Per 100,000, By Gender and Race, 2010, "The
Sentencing Project], yet they comprise only 37 percent of the general
population ["Census: Minorities Constitute 37 Percent of U.S. population",
National Journal, The Next America, May 17, 2012]. The US, with 4.6 percent
of the world's population, holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners [World
Prison Population List, 9th Editon, Roy Walmsley, International Centre for
Prison Studies].

Some 80,000 prisoners are locked up in solitary confinement in facilities
for years such as exist in Pelican Bay Prison in California, Angola
Penitentiary in Louisiana, and hundreds of others prisons. Being held in
solitary for more than 15 days was determined in 2011 by the UN Special
Rapporteur to begin devastating, often irreversible physical and mental ill
effects, and is therefore considered torture. ["Solitary Confinement: FAQ,
Solitary Watch, www.solitary watch.com]. Force-feeding of prisoners on
hunger strikes in the US is also not unusual, itself another form of torture
in violation of international law. ["Is Force -Feeding Torture?" by Joe
Nocera, New York Times, May 31, 2013]. Solitary confinement inevitably
contributes to increased risks of prison suicides, of which hundreds are
reported every year. ["Critics: 'Maximum Security' a Factor in Prison
Suicide Rate," Bob Ortega, The Republic (Arizona), June 2, 2012]. Nine
Guantanamo prisoners are reported to have died, and at least six of these
deaths were suicides. ["Guantanamo Bay Detention Center Fact Sheet -
Guatanamo By The Numbers," National Religious Campaign Against Torture].

I studied the regular use of torture in Massachusetts prisons in 1981, where
force feeding of striking prisoners was common; as was the withholding of
rights and privileges such as necessary medicine, mail, or winter clothing
during cold weather; the imposition of hazards such as flooding cells,
igniting clothes and bedding, providing too little or too much heat, and
spraying mace and tear gas; inflicting physical beatings of prisoners filing
prison complaints or litigation, of those protesting conditions using hunger
strikes; and various forms of intentional psychological abuse such as
arbitrary shakedown of cells and brutal rectal searches, ordering prisoners
to lie face down on cold floors or the outside ground before receiving food,
and empty announcements of visitors or family only later to say it was a
joke. ["Walpole State Prison: An Exercise in Torture (June 1981),
brianwillson.com/Walpole-state-prison-an-exercise-in-torture/].

During the Spanish-American war in the Philippines, President Teddy
Roosevelt proudly defended water boarding torture as part of the arsenal of
techniques to achieve "the triumph of civilization over the black chaos of
savagery and barbarism" of the Filipinos, or "googoos". In Haiti in 1920,
the NAACP investigated the conduct of U.S. Marines who were murdering
thousands of Haitians while practicing widespread torture to overcome a
Haitian revolt of "savage monkeys" against the continuing unwanted U.S.
presence there. The word googoo morphed into "gook" as the derogatory term
used by U.S. soldiers against the Vietnamese.

In 1931 President Hoover's Wickersham Report (National Commission on Law
Observance and Enforcement) concluded that the use of torture (intentional
infliction of various methods of pain and suffering) was "widespread"
throughout the entire U.S. criminal justice system. The U.S. school of the
Americas has been teaching torture ("interrogation") to Latin American
military personnel since 1946.

Torture IS U.S. policy.

Written by S. Brian Willson -

VETERANS FOR PEACE SALUTES HOWARD ZINN

Written by Board President Mike Ferner

The death of a loved one or someone significant in our life often leaves us saying, "There weren't many like him," or "she'll really leave a hole in this world."

In the case of Dr. Howard Zinn, there was no one else like him and his passing will leave a hole we can only hope will be filled some day. He was a longtime member of Veterans For Peace.

The day before he passed, VFP received an email from Howard Zinn to confirm arrangements for June to film a video greeting for our 2010 convention. In an earlier exchange, Howard had written, "Of course my heart is with VFP, but I'm not free to come. Thanks for inviting me, and best wishes for a great event. Howard."

Photo: Joseph Hand-Boniakowski, Profession Tom Conroy, and Professor Howard Zinn at Castleton State College, April 21, 2004

As a renowned historian, he made no attempt to appear objective, indeed he thought it impossible. In an opening section of "A People's History of the United States," he said he preferred "to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves...the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers." He believed history should "emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare." Then, as only Howard Zinn can, he wrote, "The reader may as well know that before going on."

From the spring in his step to the joyful, incisive wit of his words, few would have guessed his age. But at 87, his great heart, which clearly guided his remarkable intellect, finally stopped.

There may be others with great hearts and intellects to match, but Howard Zinn will be missed because he combined those with something much rarer: courage.

Some would point to his time in World War II as a B-24 bombardier, flying missions through the red-hot shrapnel of German anti-aircraft fire and Messerschmitt machine guns. Surely that is one kind of courage. It is tempered, however, by accepting that death can strike at any moment.

In his youth, Howard Zinn had the courage of a warrior. Over many decades as an adult he had another kind of courage that he practiced often, publicly and boldly, unfettered by the usual shackles of career ambitions, money or even social acceptance by ones peers.

This kind of courage, arguably the least common, Zinn frequently brought to bear in his lifelong mission of articulating uncomfortable truths and acting against injustice.

Howard Zinn with Gold Star Parents Carlos and Melida Arredondo (Also VFP Members!)

How else to explain this historian's ability to not only recognize the importance of the moment in the civil rights movement, but to encourage and join his students, eventually getting fired by Spelman College because they refused to participate as an institution; to speak publicly and early against the war in Vietnam when few with a safe job in academia dared; and most significantly, to fly into the hurricane of our most powerful myths and institutions by challenging "Three Holy Wars."

In one of his last speeches he explained that these wars were not religious, but sacrosanct, "the three wars you cannot say anything bad about: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II."

Examining his treatment of just one, the Revolution, is to begin to understand the significance of his intellect and the depth of his courage.

Zinn said that according to population differences then and now, the equivalent number of deaths today would mean "two and a half million people dying in a war to get England off our backs. Well, you might consider that worth it, or you might not."

Challenging the customary tale of our revolution, Zinn pointed out that the year before Lexington and Concord, farmers in much of western Massachusetts drove the British government out without firing a shot. "They had assembled thousands upon thousands around court houses, around official offices and they had taken over and they said good bye to the British officials."

Further challenging the standard story, he observed, "Canada is independent of England aren't they? I think so. Not a bad society. They have good health care. They have a lot of things we don't have. They didn't fight a bloody revolutionary war."

One problem he noted was we rarely take time to differentiate between various parts of the population "because we don't think in class terms. We think we all have the same interests. We all have the same interests in independence from England. We did not all have the same interests.

Perhaps most challenging, he asked, "Did blacks benefit from the Revolution? Slavery was there before; slavery was there after. No, we remained a slave society after the Revolution. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it. It is always good if you want to get people to go to war to have a good document and have good words like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...Of course, when they write the Constitution it's not, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...it's life, liberty and property. Have you noticed that difference? You should notice. You should take notice of these little things."

Howard Zinn took notice of all those "little things." He took them and, in the crucible of his intellect, forged a new story of how we came to be; a story that took great courage to articulate; a story that has the power to take us a long way down the road of freedom and peace.

January 28, 2010