The following is an excerpt from the August 6th broadcast of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.
"New Rule: You can make fun of Lynndie England all you want, but when it comes to prisons, we are all holding the leash. Now this week, America's anti-Sweetheart, Private Lynndie England, faced justice for her part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, "The Sleepover." Now, a lot of people think Abu Ghraib happened because, as Americans, we're comfortable asking our horny hillbillies to fight our wars. And we are. But we're also comfortable with pretending that anyone in America who winds up in prison for whatever reason somehow deserves not just loss of freedom but a brutalizing, terrifying trip to hell.
It's no coincidence that the guard described as the ringleader in Iraq, Charles Graner, worked before the war - where? - in a prison in America. He didn't learn to torture from the CIA or Special Ops. He picked it up right here and took his skills of abuse to Iraq. Outsourcing at its worst!
Now, we are all Lynndie England because we know what's happening in our prisons and we don't care. We tell ourselves - we tell ourselves the convenient lie that anyone who bears the label "criminal" or "terrorist" is irredeemable, sub-human, psycho scum, and so whatever happens to them behind bars is justified. When the truth is, millions of non-violent Americans have been traumatized for life in prisons simply because they either did drugs or made a bad judgment, usually when they were young, stupid and drunk. You'd think President Bush could relate.
There are over two million Americans behind bars, and that is not including the people who work at Wal-Mart. America, the nation that always has to be number one, is number one in percentage of its citizens in jail. Two million people. The equivalent of locking up all of Miami, which is not a bad idea until at least the election is over.
It costs $40 billion to house this many prisoners. Do you know how many countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 we could attack for that kind of money?
So, in conclusion, if your response to this is "not my problem," remember this: there are monsters and animals in our prisons, yes. But most didn't go in that way. But that's how they'll come out. Or to put it another way, if you think Martha Stewart has an attitude now... "
| Posted by: Tony | August 13, 2004 08:02 PM |
In the beginning prison was punishment pure and simple – the fact that the offender was removed from society was a bonus. The Victorian morality crept in and the idea changed from punishment to punishment and rehabilitation – no more picking oakum or cranking a wheel that did nothing but constructive work and a trade to support themselves and thus was born the modern prison system. Trouble is the customers are expensive to control. Trustees as cheap labour do not do the tough jobs so a tacit blind eye was used toward the ‘daddies’ of a prison, usually violent career criminals. What rises from this is a culture of acceptable violence that needs a greater amount of violence to control it. Guards have to be more violent that the daddies to command respect. However being excluded from society does not mean you are removed from society. We must keep to our rules to show the value of the rules. A cop who threatens a suspect with a prison gang rape is sailing close to the edge morally but can justify it if it gets the job done. So a thin line is walked and sometimes the wicked can take advantage of this as in the Lynndie England case. I would not say we don’t care because we try not to talk about it and that shows a degree of shame. It rather adds fuel to those who believe society to be an illusion as we choose to ignore so much that happens in society’s name an believe the sanitised version without politicking, dirty tricks and subversive operations that happen to keep society ‘safe’ |