In his monologue tonight, Bill Maher linked the banking failure, health care crisis, obesity epidemic, prison population, global warming and war profiteering all to the common problem of greed. "Humans have always been greedy, but they never convinced themselves it was good." Well, I guess not until Reagan came along.
"When they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity." — Dick Cheney, 05/21/2009
"The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness... of Dick Cheney." — Keith Olbermann, 05/21/2009
I'm still trying to get my head around Cheney's paradoxical double-flip of criticizing dissent and appealing to the terrorists all in the same gasp. I realize that ingrained deep in the Republican psyche is the stabbed-in-the-back philosophy. Failure in war is always the fault of domestic enemies and treachery in high places. Always blame the dissenters and hippies! Except now, Cheney is the dissenter... Does he even realize that?
I don't want to take away his right to disagree or anybody's right to disagree. But does he get it that he's not the one in charge now? Most of us voted for Barack Obama (he won the election, you know).
And Cheney is engaging in another old game of extreme fear-mongering (plus exaggerations and misstatements). If we don't agree with him, we're all going to die. He must have mentioned 9/11 every 30 seconds in his speech last night. Republicans can't get any blunter than that, or can they?
Why is the GOP remixing the 1964 "Daisy" ad? The main offense is that they took White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs completely out of context, but at least they were smart enough to leave out the H-Bomb of the original ad. The message is the same though: the future of America is in immediate danger. In 1964, the perceived threat was Barry Goldwater. In 2009, the perceived threat is closing the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
But I thought we had already tortured this topic. Our world-class prison industrial complex can safely hold these alleged terrorists. Supermax prisoners spend up to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement -- unable to communicate, unable to plot, and unable to escape!
Glenn Greenwald lists the convicted Muslim Terrorists already imprisoned inside the US, and he refutes another popular scare tactic. If there really were sleeper terrorist cells waiting to liberate their imprisoned comrades, then they've already had a long list of potential "target" prisons for 20 years now.
But let's not forget why the Guantanamo Bay Prison was opened in the first place. The location was ostensibly selected for its security. But let's get real. The location was really selected for its legal ambiguity. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees do indeed have habeas corpus rights.
So Dick Cheney and the RNC are scared. They're scared of something, but I'm not convinced it's the terrorists. I think their biggest fear is that nothing bad will happen, and then their ideologies, their policies, and their wars will lose even more credibility.
The world hasn't gone completely mad yet. Two top Bush-era officials, Robert Gates and Tom Ridge, say the country's national security is not in jeopardy. And at least one American town realizes that taking Guantanamo prisoners could be good for their economy.
Right now I wish Dick Cheney would take a nice long vacation. I hear Spain is lovely.
Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.
In 1970, the Supreme Court ruled that it violates equal protection to keep inmates in prison extra time because they are too poor to pay a fine or court costs. More recently, the court ruled that a state generally cannot revoke a defendant’s probation and imprison him for failing to pay a fine if he is unable to do so.
This is another example of our nation repeating history because we didn't learn the lesson the first time. Of course, the major flaw of this system is that by putting indebted people in prison, society prevents them from contributing their labor and thus makes it harder for them to pay it off and thus makes it harder for creditors to recoup their investment.
And of course, you won't see the Wall Street types going to jail even though the banks they run seem hopelessly insolvent: "The International Monetary Fund has estimated that U.S. banks will require $275 billion to $500 billion in additional capital."
It's a case of one set of rules for rich people, and another set of rules for the rest of us. It's a bit like drug prohibition. We have over half a million drug offenders incarcerated, and yet look at all the politicians who can admit to drug use and still go free.
So when we get around to rethinking these laws and prison terms regarding debt, drugs, and other crazy stuff, one question we should each ask ourselves is "self, why am I not in jail too?"
"Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?" — The Bet by Anton Chekhov
There is something about the name SuperMax that seems so doublespeak. There is something about our idea of punishment that seems so primitive. There is something about solitary confinement that is, no doubt, torture:
After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.
One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.
The story of Bobby Dellelo, told in this penetrating New Yorker article, is not unique. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in solitary confinement -- confined to a cell for at least twenty-three hours a day without experiencing any physical human contact.
Before you react with the worn-out argument that solitary confinement provides discipline and deterrence, please do read that article. There are better strategies for dealing with the most violent criminals. The British have had success with providing prisoners with opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills.
I was going to end on the note that people are mostly hooked on vengeance and politicians can't succeed without some level of tough-on-crime posturing, but then I was impressed to read that Senator Jim Webb has introduced a new bill calling for prison reform. I wish him luck in this politically risky endeavor. He is not only up against private profit-driven companies but also a public faith in a counterproductive system.
Yesterday I watched a/k/a Tommy Chong. The documentary chronicles the entrapment and incarceration of comedy icon Tommy Chong of the legendary comedy duo, Cheech and Chong. The story is an infuriating one about a U.S. Attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan, who went on a money-wasting witch-hunt to prosecute Chong and others for selling water pipes over the Internet. Feel safer? Not me.
In fact, one comment by Chong expressed how unsafe we should feel. When asked what prison was like, he answered "You'll find out."
When a moralistic government is on a mission, they'll prosecute anybody they want. It doesn't matter how benign your business or private life is... they'll come and get you with a SWAT team if it makes for a good photo-op.
I was going to blog about the ridiculous fear mongering over the plan to close Gitmo. Much of the hysteria is regarding where to keep these alleged terrorists while they await trial, and of course, much of the hysteria is ripe for parody.
First, there is the childish belief that detainees are supervillains, and somehow our world-class prison industrial complex can't hold them. Then there are the farcical scenarios where the prisoners are released into the general population. Inevitably, we hear the raucous cries from the not-in-my-backyard crowd. (Hey, I'm looking out my window right now, and my backyard isn't a maximum security prison either!)
But a controversy so absurd is best handled by The Daily Show (if video doesn't show, click here):
Still, I feel one element has been left out of this ongoing discussion. We're forgetting why the Guantanamo Bay Prison was opened in the first place. The location was ostensibly selected for its security. But let's get real. The location was really selected for its legal ambiguity. John Yoo famously opined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees. Furthermore, the US has no Status of Forces Agreement with Cuba, and thus the Bush administration argued that US courts could not review detentions. However, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise...
So at this point, closing Guantanamo is largely symbolic. And because it's so symbolic to us and the rest of the world, it is also wise. It shows the world that we've renewed our commitment to our founding principles of liberty and justice.
Hutto was a medium-security adult prison until it was converted to house families of illegal immigrants. This video provides a glimpse into the lives of the people who were detained there:
The prison population does not include Mexican immigrants because when undocumented Mexican immigrants are caught, they are automatically sent home. Instead, many of these families are asylum seekers escaping persecution in their home countries of Iraq, Somalia, Iran, or Romania. Many of them had passed the "well-founded fear" interview which is the first step in seeking asylum in the United States.
After the ACLU sued the Department of Homeland Security, many improvements have been made including providing an on-site pediatrician, eliminating the count system which forced families to stay in their cells 12 hours a day, and installing privacy curtains around toilets.
However, the New Yorker article is not just about the conditions at Hutto -- it also takes a hard look at C.C.A. (Corrections Corporation of America) which runs Hutto. Incarcerating an immigrant at Hutto costs about $61 a day, but releasing an immigrant with close supervision and electronic monitoring only costs about $12 a day. So why did the government cut this deal with C.C.A.?
C.C.A. has strong political ties. The New Yorker article states that "The company’s PAC gave more than three hundred thousand dollars during the 2006 election cycle, overwhelmingly to Republican congressional candidates, and has given more than a hundred thousand so far for the 2008 elections," and also "According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2005, the year that Homeland Security awarded C.C.A. the Hutto contract, the company paid close to $3.4 million dollars to five different firms to lobby the federal government." Also, Philip Perry, who is the son-in-law of Dick Cheney, lobbied for C.C.A. That might have something to do with it.
You should probably try to see this DVD while it's still available. Mary Beth Buchanan still has the power, and she obviously doesn't want you to see it.