Pretending to be Civilized in an Epidemic of Institutional Sadism

[babylonsister]

Pretending to be Civilized in an Epidemic of Institutional Sadism

by Pierre Tristam


From the you-can't-be-serious department: Savana Redding was a 13-year-old honors student at a small Arizona middle school. In math class one morning the principal ordered her to pack up and follow him to his office. The principal interrogated her about a planner Savana had lent a friend, and a few ibuprofin pills sitting on the principal's desk, which were found in the planner. Savana knew nothing about the pills.

The principal then ordered her to the nurse's office for a strip search. Over ibuprofin pills. Not that it would make a difference if she were carrying crack. She was 13. She was being ordered to strip. Her parents were never notified. Savana did not consent to the search but complied in humiliating details. She was forced, literally, to shake her bra and her underwear, exposing herself in front of the nurse and an assistant. Nothing was found. I don't know what's more perverse: The principal's zero-tolerance stupidity over ibuprofin pills, the degrading search, or the fact that nine U.S. Supreme Court justices will hear this case next month to decide what limits, if any, there should be on school authority.

But this isn't authority. It's criminal abuse -- of authority, of the child, of human dignity. How do we come to this? Stupid question, considering the accumulating record of a society where ideals of justice and humaneness mix with the basest controls in the name of discipline and order. They're close relatives, those school officials who order a 13 year old strip searched, to those who have children Tasered, or to police officers who now use that instrument of torture as a routine means of subjugation, or to prison guards who do the same with restraining chairs. When the barbaric becomes routine, it's called protocol. What should be denounced and forbidden is accepted and debated.

The distance has vanished from there to a government so willing to torture, and a public so willing to implicitly accept that dissolution of principles, if it's willing to debate it. "Why can't we send them to be tortured?" George W. Bush had wondered about terrorism suspects in the early days of his war, according to a new book by Patrick Tyler, The New York Times' chief diplomatic correspondent. "Stick something up their ass!" Bush got his wish in the by-now familiar litany of terrorist behavior in the name of fighting terrorism -- torture and rendition, secret prisons, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the systematic policy of brutality approved from the top that muscled up the wars' enforcers.

That's all revolting enough. But it's all been offshore, an outsourcing of depravity over there so we wouldn't have to be depraved over here -- the unspoken parallel to Bush's dismal rationale of "fighting terrorists over there so we wouldn't have to fight them over here." That's assuming that depravity can be so neatly segregated so the rest of us can go about our civilized pretensions untroubled. But those excesses weren't exceptions. They were variations on everyday norms at home that made them possible.

Abu Ghraib was bad. Our domestic prison system is worse, from the unspoken torture of the solitary confinement of thousands (as The New Yorker's Atul Gawande argues in the current issue) to the stunning yet apathy inducing fact that 7.3 million Americans are in prison, on parole or under probation. It's a $47 billion-a-year industry, the opposite of "corrections," that exceeds China's entire military budget. Can that many Americans be so disproportionately more lawless than any other people on earth? On its face, the answer is no. Americans aren't. Their criminal justice system is -- the same system, unique in the world, that imprisons 13 year olds for life, carries out executions by conveyor belt (an average of 60 a year since 2000) and turns petty marijuana inhalers into felons swelling prison cells and budget deficits.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/29

[pscot]

1. I wish I could recommend this more than once.

These are the horrifying details of the National Security State. Most of it is the work of so-called conservatives, foisted off on a mindless public, looking for easy answers. I no longer recognize this country. It's not the place I grew up in.

[azul]

2. We say we don't torture but keep our fingers crossed

behind our backs. We torture light in US prisons, and have to outsource for the heavy -with some out of sight tricks to keep some incoherent deniability and thus a modicum of self respect.

Something ain't quite right in the head here.

[undergroundpanther]

3. I went

when I was a teenager to a mental hospital. I went there because I could not take the abuse at home,at school that I was living through for years and I was cracking up from it..When I got admitted to said hospital they tortured me in the name of "treatment".
They put me in a cell alone for 18 months,they did "behavior modification" they forced drugs into me,and they were always certain staff who got off on abusing power,and would set patients up to get a reaction out of the patients.It is true some staff took pleasure in making people jump and scurry in fear.But the staff got away with it time and time again .Why? Because in the hospital unit by default there is an extreme IMBALANCE of POWER.

So,when someone is put in a mental hospital they are now considered insane, they are the other,and deemed different to the point they are dehumanized. So, the 'normal' people on the outside hearing about the shit that goes on on the inside of mental hospitals with sterling reputations and the most esteemed doctors,people are taught to assume this abuse context inside a hierarchical context. The hospital has credentials and prestige,while the 'insane' people cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their own experiences when they get abused by staff or "authorities". The imbalance of power perverts justice and it can distort even the truth about abuse of power and whom is abusing that power..

Because our culture is built upon hierarchies and abuse of power and because society in general is in deep denial about this fact,issues like torture goes on being minimized and the victims of the system who speak up and tell their stories are ridiculed, shunned or called 'weak'..or even worse BLAMED for the things they suffered through.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rcip/invuln.html

Because it seems most 'normal' people don't want to think one day it could be themselves arbitrarily locked up in a cell,stripped of power and human rights forcibly drugged or having their mind fucked with,by bad people with too much control who are supposed to"help" us all.

So as a culture built on the behaviors of abuse or be abused,still in deep denial about it and often ignorant of knowing what abuse is,or is not . It becomes very easy to deny the traumatized among us real help and real justice.It also ensures abusers will keep getting away with torture,be it a government,an institution,a corporation or a household tyrant.

http://www.angelfire.com/md/imsystem/sibabuse.html

At some point we are going to have to give up the idea all people are good deep down, because some are not good.

At some point we are going to have to defend each other and value each other even if they are a stranger,and take a risk to prevent trauma being inflicted yet again.

Eventually we will have to acknowledge this rampant abuse of power is not always in the open ,not always simple,and power abuse is abuse of people.

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06_politic.html

We will eventually have to face up and ask why is our culture full of traumatized people and the people who traumatized them are permitted to go on traumatizing,we pity the perpetrators and blame the victims. Humanity has to STOP doing this.And admit abusers of power CHOOSE to abuse power so they can traumatize people to make them believe they are powerless.

Eventually we will have to do whatever it takes to stop those who abuse power,to abuse people.


Those in control use societal institutions to justify, support, and enforce the relationship of dominance and make extensive efforts to obtain general acceptance of the premises that hierarchy is natural and that those at the bottom are there because of their own deficiencies.

The consciousness of separateness prevails. Differences among people are not celebrated and treasured but used as a reason to dominate. When relationships of dominance become the norm in a culture, then all individuals within it are socialized to internalize those values or exist on the fringe of society. Individuals mirror global and national relationships in their own interpersonal relationships.

http://www-old.infoxchange.net.au/wise/DVIM/DAIP.htm

[babylonsister]

4. Very grim personal experience.

Thanks for sharing. :hug:

[burning rain]

7. That was a harrowing.

I'm impressed and grateful that you've shared it with us here.

[zeemike]

8. Good to see you are still here Panther.

And you already know that I agree with you.

[undergroundpanther]

10. How you doin?Zeemike?

I haven't been online much at all lately,I miss alot of Du'ers on here.
Anyway I pop in from time to time,to check out stuff..I don't always have time to post tho.
Been busy with a lot of psych rights and psych survivor stuff like being on a 'quality control board'(sarcastic laugh), and helping around at the local peer run drop in..and generally being a pain in the ass to the uptight control freaks who cannot grok what peer run MEANS..(snicker)

[zeemike]

11. I'm doing fine

Just keep being a pain in the ass to control freeks...they need it.

[Igel]

5. We've gotten rather intolerant of error, haven't we?

I mean, when I went to school teachers made mistakes, parents made mistakes, and principals made mistakes. Kids made lots of mistakes. How they were dealt with depended on the circumstances.

If a mistake was repeated often enough, a rule was made about it and some oversight was supposed to be instituted to prevent having the mistake be too common. Rules intended to stop any wrongdoing, to criminalize merely suspicious behavior, to prevent the possibility of something not going the way we want it to go ... are almost always bad. Take Congress' response to the AIG retention bonuses as a case in point, a law made without much regard for a lot of people who'll be affected, because punishing the bad guys after the fact and keeping the mistake from ever happening again is so essential.

Now, everything's zero tolerance. Contra poster 1, it happens across the political spectrum. Even those who pride themselves on their tolerance are lacking in any tolerance in many ways. Every error must have an iron-clad rule formulated to prevent its ever happening again. To do so, teachers have rules that must be followed: That ibuprofen might be something else, well, we can't have a teacher try to evaluate the circumstances. No, the student must be sent to the principal, who also has no room for judgment. The principal doesn't dare make a mistake that violates the zero-tolerance policy, so he has the kid nearly strip searched as the lesser of two evils (sorry, down to undies isn't a full-fledged "strip search"--perhaps a "partial strip search").

The result of having a rule for everything is that the system can't work: You can't follow a million separate rules, all of equal importance--a sense of proportion is lost, a sense that those in lower levels of authority are allowed to have any actual authority. To prevent any error, we show distrust of our subordinates. Enforcement with a million rules is at least as arbitrary than when there are a couple dozen rules except that the consequences are nastier.

Quite a society we've created, in many respects.

[Solly Mack]

6. K&R

[zeemike]

9. And i am old enough to have seen it all progress to now

And basically it started with the kids.
New values were implanted in their minds by media and society that allowed them to believe that the end justifies the means.
And that the goal of all should to make as much money as possible as quick as possible.
And this is the harvest that we reap.

[Time for change]

12. Excellent article

When will our country wake up and demand that something be done about this?