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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Grotesque. Something I noticed several years ago (with the second Iraq War) was the mainstreaming of behavior that previous seemed to stay hidden in the prison system among prison guards and the worst level of corrupt cops. If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South.

We seem to be progressively empowering more and more fearless bullies in all walks of life; even mall cops and campus cops now act like they are cleaning up a riot in a Supermax.

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"The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."

When Hamilton wrote this 230 years ago, he was talking of the standing army (of which he was not an opponent, recognizing its necessity - but also recognizing the dangers). An argument could be made - indeed, has been made by many - that modern law enforcement agencies are, in many ways, like a standing army, or at least would be recognized as such by the founders. And if so, it would seem that the above is equally applicable to them.

That's actually a really good point. At the time of founding, standing police forces were pretty much non-existent in the US (and not very widespread in the rest of the world). Law enforcement was mostly handled by an elected sheriff who would raise a militia when necessary.

>you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South.

If your were surprised my Michael Brown et. al. then you just weren't up to date on how the cops treat poor and/or black people. If you were surprised by the stuff Snowden published it was because you didn't know the history of the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. If anything the ATF does surprises you then you must have just slept through the 90s. If this surprises you then you probably weren't keeping tabs on civil liberties at the border, there's been a slow trickle of allegations like this over the years. They can't all be false.

It's all just shit. All these organizations just do terrible things with alarming frequencies but it's ok because they only abuse "bad" people and when they abuse innocent people they can either revise the narrative to make those innocent people bad and/or those innocent people are poor and not well connected. It's like the population is so overwhelmed that it can't focus on fixing any one agency.

Going to get a lot of hate for this, but my cranky anarchist take is that these institutions are broken because they're broken by nature and shouldn't exist. Punitive, carceral systems have never not been full of rampant abuse above their mandate, but the baseline nature of what they do is horrific on its own. Carceral institutions do not address undesirable social phenomena, they exacerbate them and then punish the families of the alleged perpetrators. Not to mention the absolute brutality they enact in trying to enforce the laws.

On one hand I agree with the “broken by nature” argument, I really do. To me, it’s a strong argument for cutting down our criminal code and not jailing people over drugs, sex, and fines. I still want rapists and killers and inveterate thieves removed from society though, but I don’t want to kill them. Without incarceration how do we achieve these seemingly contradictory aims? I don’t have a good answer, but neither “keep it as it is” or “burn it all down” sound good.

There are lots of ideas about this, but generally the restorative/transformative justice frameworks are the things prison abolitionists tend to focus on. I'm not well versed on the research surrounding these things, I'm sure there are limitations and criticisms, but I've always thought they advocated a reasonable start for thinking about dismantling carceral systems. Mariame Kaba, an author and activist who writes a lot about this, has a good reading list here:

http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/essential-pic-reading-li...

yep, transformative justice seems natural to me. taking 'anti-social' people and isolating them in a situation where there's little semblance of the life they're supposed to start living does not.

That's a good point I think- we put people in jail because a) we've always put people in jail and b) we still can't think of anything better to do. As justifications for screwing peoples' lives up go, this one's pretty weak.

Oh and, er- please don't misunderstand me. I'm not accusing you of trying to excuse anything.

> If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren't paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South.

Prison guards in the South in the early 2000s were making the equivalent of photographic "trading cards" glorifying their torture, rape, and humiliation of inmates[1]? I'll admit I've never read anything about that.

Can you give some links to stories that covered this at the time?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

You seem to think that glangdale is trying to play down Abu Ghraib. I think they're acknowledging the horror there while also trying to draw attention to other atrocities.

Again-- what are some links to investigative reports of these atrocities that were happening in prisons of the South around the early 2000s (or 1990s) in the U.S. which are "exactly the same sort of thing" as Abu Graib?

I don't have any links on hand, personally, but I'm sure you're as good at googling as I am, maybe better.

Why are you so skeptical about the idea that serious abuse may have occurred in Southern prisons? Are you concerned about slandering innocent Southern prison workers? Do you think that it would diminish the importance of the Abu Ghraib atrocities? Or are you just nitpicking over whether they were really, literally exactly as bad, as opposed to merely very-bad-but-not-quite-as-bad?

Here's a memorandum opinion somewhere in the middle. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

If (like me) you're mostly interested in substantiation of the claim, the summary of the situation seems useful already. There are also plenty of references and keywords to be found in this document.

For instance, many news reports and court documents seem to refer back to a quote from section XI-A; searching for "culture of sadistic and malicious violence" yielded a large number of relevant hits.

Apparently this has been a well known issue, and all 3 branches have been working on improvement.

Thanks, that is helpful and I'll have a look.

Even so, I still don't understand the phrase "mainstreaming of behavior" and the connection to Abu Graib.

If I take that phrase seriously, I would imagine it means some process similar the militarization of the U.S. police force after the Iraq war. There, dehumanizing types of "occupation" tactics came from a place hidden to most Americans (Iraq) to American towns and cities themselves. Combined with the anti-terrorism federal grant money, there is a clear cause and effect that I've seen reported in various mainstream investigative reports over the past decade. (I don't have footnotes atm but happy to provide them if anyone really hasn't heard about this connection.)

So in my example, you have systems, tactics, defense contractors, and in some cases the soldiers themselves coming back to militarize the U.S. police force. So something hidden-- troop behavior abroad-- went mainstream-- local and regional police in U.S.

What's the meaning of "mainstreaming of behavior" in the GP's example? How did guard's prisoner abuse in the U.S. South turn into broader atrocities like Abu Graib?

I'm not saying there's not a connection there, and I'd certainly like to learn about it if it exists.

But if I seem snide, it's because I don't think there is any good reason an educated American citizen should have any foreknowledge of the connection the GP seems to be making between Abu Graib and prisoner abuse in the U.S. South. Don't tell people they weren't "paying attention" when you can cite high quality investigative journalism. And if there's no high quality investigative journalism, don't make the remark.

I realize not everyone gets the same google results back, so this is not deterministic, but the first most naive search I could come up with based on the information available to both of us was:

culture of sadistic and malicious violence abu graib

and my first hit was https://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0520/p02s01-usju.html .

Can you tell me what your first hit was? Where are you having trouble?

> How did guard's prisoner abuse in the U.S. South turn into broader atrocities like Abu Graib?

One extremely subtle connection that we could make here is the fact that some of the key perpetrators and leaders of the abuse were FORMER SOUTHERN PRISON GUARDS.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu...

"Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:

'What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.'"

The guy that pulled the longest sentence for the abuse was a prison guard between stints in Iraq 1 and Iraq 2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Graner

Not really subtle, here. This stuff was all over the reportage of Abu Gharaib at the time and an 'educated American citizen' might well have actually noticed if they were inclined to notice things. I would suggest that being inclined to notice this sort of thing isn't that psychologically pleasant; making Abu Gharaib into a bizarre exception ("war is hell") is way more comforting than paying attention to all that investigative journalism about what prisons are like in the US.

Just because the journalism exists certainly doesn't imply that people we 'paying attention'; your overly confident skepticism and lack of grasp on basic facts on Abu Gharaib is a fine illustrative example.

I'm not going to drag out the links to stuff like this in US prisons but reading through stories about abuses in prisons in the US south is pretty gruesome reading and not hard to find. If you're actually interested, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/advocacy/prisons/u-s.htm is a decent (if old) starting point. I will just simply assert that upon seeing the Abu Gharaib stuff, I was struck not by shock but by familiarity having read a fair bit of stuff about that in the 90s.

Not just the 1990s and early 2000s. Read about what happens in present-day Angola (Louisiana State Penn.).

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