So, Knowing What You Know …

April 23, 2009 at 8:20 pm (By Miles Lascaux)

… would you rather spend the next year in detention in Guantanamo Bay as a falsely accused terrorism suspect, or in the typical state penitentiary in the U.S. as a falsely accused drug dealer or rapist?

-Miles Lascaux

3 Comments

  1. lfineaux said,

    April 24, 2009 at 1:18 am

    Depends on my religion.

  2. Icepick said,

    April 25, 2009 at 11:32 am

    Gitmo, no question.

  3. Callimachus said,

    April 26, 2009 at 5:35 pm

    I wrote this thinking more about our prisons than about our terrorists.

    Not long ago, in this town, someone shot into a car at a Taco Bell drive-thru late at night and wounded a little black girl. A white man was arrested for this dastardly crime and put into county prison to await trial. By the time police realized they had the wrong man and released him without charges, he had been maimed for life.

    We, as a nation, tolerate a high degree of gratuitous brutality towards men in our prisons — men wholly at the mercy of the state. Men who, in many cases, we know will turn out not to have committed the crime that landed them there. The guards sometimes are complicit, if not active participants.

    Why? Is it because it’s mostly Them doing to Each Other? Is it our secret pact to allow certain brutalization as a deterent to crime?

    Does this have any connection whatsoever to the abuse of prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib? Weren’t at least some of the soldiers in that case pursuing careers as prison guards?

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