Current Affairs: A study of American detention centres for illegal immigrants reveals abuse, brutality and deprivations, writes Bill McSweeney.
American attitudes to crime and punishment are shocking to European sensibilities. Not just the existence of, even enthusiasm for, the death penalty in so many states, but the scale of sentences, the indignities added to restraint in the management of prisoners, and the lingering racism in a penal system skewed against ethnic minorities in areas of urban poverty.
How any society treats its weakest members is a benchmark of its progress as a civilised nation. At the polar limits of life, the obvious focus of humane attention are the young and the aged, especially those in conditions of family impoverishment. Here the US is no worse in its treatment of the weak than many other developed societies.
We all pass through these stages of life and can empathise more readily with the weakness of age and infancy.
It requires a leap of moral sensitivity to feel a similar identification with those convicted of serious crime and sentenced to long-term incarceration. Most of us have no experience or expectation of sharing their lot. And in an age of victim rights and tabloid campaigns to insinuate the feelings of victim families into the sentencing process, it is difficult to restrain the populist urge for revenge and for downgrading the basic decencies of rehabilitation in favour of punishment.
At least the long-term prisoners in American jails, whose condition disturbs human rights activists and lawyers throughout the world, have passed through a formal process of law. Not so with the thousands of innocents incarcerated in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and subjected to interrogation techniques which have shocked the world.
These are not the victims of "bad apples" in the US military. Mark Dow's depiction of the detention centres used for illegal immigrants into the United States - the "gulags" of the title - documents the systematic abuse and denial of human rights and due process suffered for years by migrants fleeing poverty or tyranny, or just for outstaying the terms of their visa. The Board of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the body charged with detaining such illegals, and its enthusiasm for the job results in an average of 23,000 prisoners in its various facilities on any given day. Supervision of its detention officers is made more difficult by the practice of sub-contracting the work to private companies whose profit motive discourages adequate training or surveillance of their employees.
Dow's graphic accounts of the beatings, sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation and sodomising of detainees make the point forcibly that such an attitude towards the weakest of humanity is not simply a product of the trauma of September 11th. Nor is it directed only towards those suspected of breaking the law. He tells of the "nigger roasting" of a Somali who joined a group of fellow nationals queuing voluntarily for political asylum. He was locked in a car parked in front of the asylum building in the midday heat with the windows shut. When a female officer complained she was told: "I just want them to quit coming here."
In another case in 2002, a group of Somalis seeking political asylum were handed over to the care of a contract agency called European Union Sky Marshals for deportation. After a harrowing journey they landed at Mogadishu and were driven by bus to the city centre. "Trailing them were soldiers driving trucks and 50-caliber machine guns mounted on the roofs. In downtown Mogadishu the prisoners were pulled from the bus, released from their shackles, and abandoned, left to fend for themselves."
Dow's stories of brutality towards immigrants are recounted in 14 lively chapters in which the victims themselves make a powerful case for the American justice system to answer. The book has been upstaged by the dramatic illustrations of similar behaviour leaking out of Iraq, but its value, nonetheless, is to underline the continuity of the behaviour in Iraq with a longer history.
It might have been much improved had the author addressed this continuity and the deeper problem of why such primitive attitudes towards crime and punishment still survive in his native America. If the bad-apple theory does not account for it, as he has demonstrated, what is the explanation? More to the point, is there any solution? What accounts for the gap between American attitudes and practices in this regard and those of the European Union? It is surely related to historic cultural differences which elevate the freedom of the individual over social constraint in the determination of moral responsibility. And related also to different religious traditions which depict a clear, cosmic struggle of good against evil across the Atlantic, in contrast to the grey, equivocal, chastened maybe, perhaps kinder, universe inherited by Europeans.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin