Prisoner Abuse Research Articles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Identifying potentially morally injurious events from the Veteran perspective: A qualitative descriptive study

LAY SUMMARY Current conceptualizations of potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs) emphasize war atrocities (e.g., killing of children or civilians, witnessing abuse of prisoners of war). Additional research on PMIEs could inform provision of patient-centred care in pursuit of healing for those experiencing moral injury. The field would benefit from an operationalization of PMIEs that is not only grounded in empirical data and meaningful to clinicians but also accounts for the perspectives of the Veterans who experienced PMIEs. This study sought to gain a more in-depth understanding of and explore Veterans’ experiences surrounding PMIEs.

Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution

Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution

The Impact of Social Media on the Freedom Movement in Indian held Kashmir

The contemporary phase of the youth-led freedom movement in Indian Held Kashmir (IHK) is not confined to the armed rebellion by the Kashmiri youth but is also coupled with a non-violent approach using social media against the atrocities and human rights violations such as systematic torture, rape, extrajudicial killing, and prisoner abuse, by the committed by the Indian armed forces. Victims' stories have been well-documented and 're-packaged for the world community through social media. The freedom movement went through various phases throughout history, and the most recent phase was introduced in 2016 after the brutal killings carried out by the Indian armed forces that included Burhan Muzaffar Wani, a youth-icon and a freedom fighter who used social media as a communication tool. The use of modern communication technologies like social media ensures that the narrative of the people of Kashmir regarding the freedom from the illegal occupation of Kashmir and suppression by Indian security forces would spread all around the world. This paper applies social movement framing analysis to this contemporary freedom movement in IHK to better understand the ways in which it is being re-defined by activists through exposure and affiliation to other transnational protest movements and re-framed in a manner that stresses the universal applications of contemporary human rights mobilizations.

Tortured Images in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer & the War on Terror

This article develops an analytic of torture to read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel The Sympathizer beyond its narrative time surrounding the US war in Vietnam. By focusing on Nguyen’s description and uses of torture in the text, the article locates the period’s gender-, sexuality-, and race-based violence as part of an ongoing genealogy of US state-sanctioned torture, predicated upon Orientalist assumptions about pain, sexuality, and humanity. Specifically, the article reads the narrator’s forced confession and his use of staged photographs to torture others in dialogue with the 2004 photographs documenting prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Nguyen’s novel emerged a decade later amid debate on the use of torture, only one year after the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its “Torture Report,” condemning the inhumane interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib. By having his characters draw on US training materials and advisors to implement torture practices infamously replicated decades later, Nguyen demonstrates that United States-led torture is not an exception, but rather state policy. Nguyen’s novel excavates these teleologies of racialized violence in the United States for popular audiences and puts forth a sharp historical critique of US racialized violence and militarized intervention.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ ФІЗИЧНОГО НАСИЛЬСТВА, ТОРТУР ТА ЖОРСТОКОГО ПОВОДЖЕННЯ ПО ВІДНОШЕННЮ ДО ВІЙСЬКОВОПОЛОНЕНИХ

Introduction. The military conflict which is being carried out in the east of Ukraine, brings forward new requirements to various aspects of the military’s life activity. Aspects of the troops capture by the opposing party become much more important. The questions of survival of the military in captivity in the course of contacts with people who escort soldiers after the capture, guards and local population when traveling on enemy territory in case of escape turn out to be of current interest. The vast majority of prisoners faced the conditions that they could not even imagine in their life environment before war (another level of living, restrictions, humiliation, bullying, violence, beatings, torture, etc.), which encourage them to strive to achieve a common goal - to survive. As a result of non-stop interrogations, constant beatings and abuse soldiers in captivity have changes in the nature of the physiological and psychological activity.In our opinion, the question of the application of torture to prisoners of war is very relevant, especially their impact on the psyche of soldiers and psychological consequences of staying in these conditions.Purpose: to identify the psychological features of torture against prisoners of war in the current military conflict. Methods: content analysis of online resources and interviews.Originality. The article presents data on the use of physical violence, torture and ill-treatment in relation to prisoners of war during the anti-terrorist operation in the East of Ukraine. The description of the circumstances, procedures and methods of getting a soldier into captivity is provided. The procedures that imitated the activities of the bodies of inquiry, investigation or judicial bodies in the occupied territories, namely, detention, interrogation, conviction, are considered. The article reviews the places of illegal detention of prisoners of war and identifies the possibility of using various types of torture, physical or psychological violence or other means of pressure in these conditions. The article analyzes the most common means of violent influence (beatings, simulated shooting, electric current, strangulation, public humiliation, etc.). The most common means of violence is beating: with hands, feet, rubber sticks, pieces of furniture, on various parts of the body. One person as well as and several people participated in the procedure of beating the prisoner. The data on application during interrogations an electric current as a torture, by means of the military telephone device is presented. The article presents data on the use of torture in the form of suppression using a plastic bag. Violent influence due to suppression was carried out until the person lost consciousness. This was repeated several times in a row. In addition to the above types of violence, other methods of influence were applied to the military servants who were in captivity in order to increase physical and psychological suffering (public humiliation, rape, threats against close people and family members, etc.). The article determines that one of the main purposes of the use of violent influence on persons who were in illegal isolation was to force them to participate in the shooting of staged videos according to a pre-prepared scenario.Conclusion. 1. Being a soldier in the psychological environment of "cultural trauma" leads to deformation of the personality of a prisoner, in some cases it can result in personal growth, in others it leads to regressive behaviors and degradation that could be considered as boundaries of this psychological environment.2. In a hybrid war capturing of soldiers has psychological characteristics depending on the type of unit that they are held captive at and has different purposes, for military units it is mainly the need to cease resistance of the enemy, and to demonstrate the strength, skill and intimidate the enemy, beatings of prisoners and depriving them of sleep and food was common among them, interrogations were carried out to prevent escape and induce cooperation. Professional mercenaries intend to intimidate the enemy and demonstrate the strength and skill, interrogations of professional mercenaries were characterized by brutal torture, violence and murders of prisoners of war. Exchanges and buyouts were typical for gangs. The characteristic feature of interrogation, conducted by the gang units, was abuse of prisoners for profit.3. In our opinion, the perspective direction of further scientific research is the study of methods of diagnosis and psychological work with trauma for each particular case (rape, amputation, castration, etc.).

Influence of drugs on prison suicide - A retrospective case study

The prevalence of mental disorders and comorbidity with substance abuse and personality disorders is high in prisoners. Furthermore, drug abuse in prison is a widespread problem throughout prisons around the world. In this retrospective study, we analyzed the prison deaths over six years (2012–2017). For each death, we collected data of the Berlin prison system, the prison hospital and the State Institute for Forensic and Social Medicine Berlin and the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, Charité Medical University Berlin. In total, 33 prisoners died during our study period, of which 24 committed suicide. In 25% of the suicide cases, forensic toxicology reports were positive for drugs without cases of lethal intoxication. A direct influence of drug intoxication on prisoner deaths and suicide was not common in our data. Small sample size, a missing control group, and the retrospective study design limit generalizability of the results.

On Solid Ground: Evaluating the Effects of Foundational Arguments on Human Rights Attitudes

What makes some human rights campaigns for the physical integrity rights of prisoners more effective than others? Despite various normative arguments condemning these practices, only limited systematic analysis documents the relative effectiveness of different arguments on individuals. This is surprising, because the success of human rights campaigns depends on getting individuals to care about and support policy positions that protect human rights. We constructed an experiment to compare the effects of six different arguments against prisoner abuse and torture. We found that an argument which emphasized the suffering of the prisoner had a consistently positive and significant effect on opposition to torture and prisoner abuse. However, this effect was largely contingent on subjects’ political ideology. Political conservatives actually became less opposed to torture, on average, after reading the same argument emphasizing the prisoners’ suffering or the sacredness of human beings.

The Kennedy Administration and Arms Transfers to Ba‘thist Iraq

From June until November of 1963, Iraq’s first Ba‘thist regime conducted a ruthless war of pacification against an insurrection of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the country’s mountainous north. The regime perpetrated large-scale human rights violations against Kurdish fighters and non-combatants, including summary executions, crop destruction, abuse of prisoners, and ethnic cleansing. The U.S. defense, intelligence, and diplomatic establishments during the presidential administration of John F. Kennedy were fully aware of the regime’s war crimes. Despite that fact, the administration transferred to the Iraqi government military equipment, parts, ammunition, and weapons that it required for the prosecution of its war. American officials displayed a remarkably uniform consensus of opinion about the utility of arming the Ba‘thist regime. Yet, the questions of what specific goals the United States could accomplish in supplying weapons and what weapons should be supplied divided policy makers in the Defense and State Departments, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). Their differences were sharpened because the Kennedy administration thoroughly enmeshed its global Cold War strategies with its economic strategies directed at the U.S. balance of payments deficit and because the administration institutionalized a partnership between the Pentagon and the American defense industry.

Response to John W. Schiemann’s review of Life and Death in Captivity: The Abuse of Prisoners During War

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Life and Death in Captivity: The Abuse of Prisoners During War. By Geoffrey P. R. Wallace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 296p. $39.95 cloth.

Life and Death in Captivity: The Abuse of Prisoners During War. By Geoffrey P. R. Wallace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 296p. $39.95 cloth.

Review and Concept Paper; Norris, Robert J., 2017; Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement.

The most salient theme of the book is that the Innocence Movement represents one piece of a broader historical and contemporaneous social reform perspective in the pursuit of social and legal justice. The movement cannot be seen in isolation, but is historically part of the movements for social justice rising from the civil rights era and the Earl Warren procedural due process era at the US Supreme Court. And besides the history of the roots in social justice movements, the study of wrongful convictions reveals important contemporaneous issues of criminal justice reform, as well as broader social issues, beyond the “narrow confines of innocence.” “All of the factors that impact what we see in criminal justice also affect wrongful convictions; race class gender, politics, and moral emotions all impact the extent to which people receive justice.” And, further, a study of the legal system and justice itself is an important lens to view larger social problems. The interviewees confirm this. “…Criminal Justice will always tell you a good amount about what is wrong with your society, about what is wrong with your culture…” The issue of prison reform is made even more palatable and enhanced by the fact that in addition to suffering deplorable conditions and abuse in prison, it is happening to undeserving innocent persons. And, beyond prison issues, wrongful convictions allow you to see “fundamental issues like race, authority, and the relationship between citizen and state” more clearly… Debates over the war on drugs and mass incarceration …are intimately tied to conversations about race, class, families, and neighborhoods.” As evidence of the broad reach of the Innocence movement, Norris perceptively suggests that the innocence movement was invigorated by the tough on punishment policies, “punitive turn” because more persons were severely affected. Another nexus of the social and historical connections of the Innocence Movement is its connection with Death Penalty Abolition discussed in chapter 2 of the book. The connection between Innocence, Exonerations and the Death Penalty is not only an important theme of this book, but is a main issue in the study of the innocence movement, as further discussed below.

The captive brain: torture and the neuroscience of humane interrogation.

Despite it being abhorrent and illegal, torture is sometimes employed for information gathering. However, the extreme stressors employed during torture force the brain away from the relatively narrow, adaptive range of function it operates within. Torture degrades signal-to-noise ratios of information yield and increases false positive discovery rates. As a discovery methodology, torture fails basic tests of veridical, reliable and replicable information discovery. Torture fails during interrogation because it is an assault on our core integrated, social, psychological and neural functioning. There is a need for a profound cultural shift regarding torture, recognizing that torture impairs, rather than facilitates, investigations and truth-finding. Rising to this challenge will increase operational effectiveness, eliminate prisoner abuse and torment, and aid veridical and actionable information gathering. Policy regarding prisoner and detainee interrogation need to be refocused as a behavioural and brain sciences problem, and not simply treated as a legal, ethical or philosophical problem. Getting the science, ethics and practice in line is a challenge, but it can and should be done.

Claiming Human Rights: Iranian Political Prisoners and the Making of a Transnational Movement, 1963–1979

This essay examines the transnational movement against prisoner abuse and torture in Pahlavi Iran in the 1960s-1970s. Arguing that the notion of human rights in this era was neither fixed nor stable, it analyzes the encounter between Iranian revolutionaries, students, and intellectuals and international human rights activists and organizations. It argues that the growing prominence of prisoner abuse in Iran provided a rallying point for Iranian dissidents of various political stripes in the years before the 1979 revolution as well as a testing ground for the emergent global human rights movement at a time when this movement had not yet cohered into the industry it is today.

Book Review: Life and Death in Captivity: The Abuse of Prisoners during War. Geoffrey P. R. Wallace

Book Review: <i>Life and Death in Captivity: The Abuse of Prisoners during War</i>. Geoffrey P. R. Wallace

Epidemiological Study of Mortality Rate from Alcohol and Illicit Drug Abuse in Iran.

The estimate of mortality associated with illicit opiate use provides useful information to those directing and monitoring local, national and international policies and programs. This study investigated the epidemiology of mortality due to the illegal consumption of narcotics and psychotropic substances in the Iran to provide evidence-based public health data for useful programs and actions aimed at preventing drug-related mortality. A cross-sectional study. The information regarding all cases of psychotropic positive was collected from Legal Medicine Organization, occurred on Mar 2015 to Feb 2016. Demographic and epidemiological data were extracted from recorded documents. Data were then analyzed in Stata software. Overall, 2306 died cases from opioid or psychotropic abuse were evaluated. The mean age of the subjects was 36.07±12.61 yr, they were mostly single male, and 88.64% of them had Iranian nationality. The mortality rate from opiate and psychotropic abuse in the whole country was 38.22 per 1000000 population. The most common location of death was at home or in another private residence. History of overdose, suicide, hospitalization in psychiatric hospital, staying in prison and substance abuse in the family observed in some people who died from drug abuse. Mortality rate from substance abuse is more among unmarried young men aged 30-39 yr with low education level also in self-employed. We suggest policies to prevent this person accessing and using drug.

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement and Prisoner Abuse

AbstractBandura's research and theory on the mechanisms of moral disengagement demonstrate the various ways that persons distance themselves from their mistreatment of others to avoid or circumvent ethical constraints that should and otherwise would govern their behavior. This article examines the serious problem of prisoner abuse through the lens of moral disengagement theory to understand in part why such abuse occurs and persists. This application of moral disengagement theory underscores the importance of addressing these social psychological dynamics in any program of prison reform and the need for further research in a setting that traditionally has resisted in‐depth empirical examination.

Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Restraints to Control Sexual Abuse of Female Prisoners in Correctional Facilities

ABSTRACTCommunity activists and state legislators have expressed great concern over the sexual abuse of female prisoners by corrections officers (CO)s. The purpose of the current empirical case study was to explore COs’ experience with gender-mandated job roles in a correctional facility. Eleven retired COs were interviewed to determine if the job change prohibiting 15 male COs from working inside female prisoner housing units had an effect on employee morale. Data was collected using face-to-face interviews with semi structured open-ended questions. Five themes emerged in our findings: (1) process change, (2) interpersonal relationships, (3) employee development, (4) management optimization, and (5) strategies for improvement. The results revealed prohibiting male corrections officers from working inside female prisoner housing units decreased employee morale.

Abu Ghraib and the Temporal Logic of Interruption

On April 28, 2004, CBS News broadcasted the first photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib Detention Centre. These photos, a censored fraction of more than two hundred photographs and nineteen videos taken at the detention centre, render in colour all manner of abuse at the hands of US Army military police. Taken the previous fall, the photographs were anonymously shared with Army criminal investigators by Sgt. Joseph Darby, a soldier stationed at Abu Ghraib. At the behest of the Bush Administration, the story was kept sealed for months and “amnesty” was declared by the military. But in the spring of 2004, the story broke. The documentation of abuses at Abu Ghraibquickly travelled, their digitality facilitating local and global circulation. This essay argues that the Abu Ghraib scandal is a form of “what crops up,” (3) in Paul Virilio’s terms, what is invented by the War on Terror and the United States willingness to treat human bodies as a means to an end. I propose that the Abu Ghraib scandal illustrates a key temporal logic structuring the contemporary relationship between rhetoric and torture: the rhetorical interruption. The narrative of violence produced by the photographs and their release demonstrates how such visual representations of violence can disrupt and displace attention from the system that created them; and this interruption serves as a manifestation of one of several complex connections between time, rhetoric, and violence. Keywords: Torture, Rhetoric, Temporality, Abu Ghraib, Interruption, Paul Virilio

Editors' Note: Contesting the Structures of Power and Exclusion

Editors' NoteContesting the Structures of Power and Exclusion Guisela Latorre, Mytheli Sreenivas, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu Feminist critiques of transformations, movements, and hierarchies in different social contexts have truly enhanced many aspects of humanities and social science research over the past forty years. Gender scholars have offered both nuanced and complex insights into the mechanisms that maintain and police social stratification. We anticipate that the writings featured in this issue will further allow us to ascertain how these mechanisms affect the individual lives of women and gender others. The intersectional, decolonial, and interdisciplinary lenses that our authors use signal exciting new developments in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Deconstructing the social and scientific technologies of modernity designed to regulate physical and discursive bodies in patriarchal settings is an important intellectual mission for a number of our contributors to this issue. Nicole Sanders in "Gender and Consumption in Porfirian Mexico" explores how new consumer technologies in turn-of-the-century Mexico encouraged middle-and upper-class women to uphold traditional gender roles and racial exclusions. Also interested in how technologies inform body politics, Emily Johnston in "Poisoned Subjects" documents the life narratives of the women who used the fertility drug diethylstilbestrol (des) and developed vaginal and cervical cancer as a result. The technologies of war and women's bodies are the center of the short story "Soldier Girl" by Marjorie Maddox, which provides a semi-fictionalized account of Lynndie England, the woman at the center of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. While addressing the critical role that technologies of modernity play on the physical body, our contributors were also attentive to constructions of discursive bodies through the technologies of language and culture. The article "Fleshing Out the Ambiguous Body" by Sara Cohen Shabot rummages through the writings of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, who in his various narratives proposes non-binary ways to regard bodies within the culturally hybrid geographies of Africa. [End Page vii] Technology not only informs our physical and figurative embodiments; it also affects our capacity for knowledge production and for literacy acquisition. The gendered discourses of science and progress that it generates, ones that privilege male whiteness, are challenged by some of our authors in this issue. Engineering scholar Kacey Beddoes writes in her essay titled "Institutional Influences that Promote Studying Down in Engineering Diversity Research" that the underrepresentation of women and minorities in that field persist because attempts at diversification ignore structural inequalities within the discipline. Sara Giordano in "Feminists Increasing Public Understandings of Science" urges scholars and students in the sciences to challenge assumptions of objectivity and absolute truth in order to make way for feminist and critical thinking skills in those areas of study. Both of these texts call for a profound transformation of educational institutions, a struggle that feminist educators have been waging for over a century. Some of the origins of the present-day struggles that both Beddoes and Giordano address can be appreciated in Patricia Carter's essay "Guiding the Working-Class Girl," where the author discusses the important work educator Henrietta Rodman carried out on behalf of working-class women during the early twentieth century in New York City. While the structures of inequality that Beddoes, Giordano, and Carter document in their articles are firmly situated within the United States, those addressed in the contributions by Sandra Mizumoto Posey, Sirpa Salenius, Gregory D. Smithers, and Janey Lew in this issue are transnational in nature. The personal narrative "Made in Occupied Japan" by Mizumoto Posey tells of the author's experiences with her transnational family whose history spanned the territories of the United States, Japan, and other parts of Asia, having been subject to gender oppression in all those locales. But empowerment and feminist resistance too are transnational. Salenius in "Transatlantic Interracial Sisterhoods" tells us about the U.S.–European transatlantic dialogues among women that animated social justice causes during the nineteenth century. Likewise, the artwork by Trinh Mai also featured here underscores the strength the artist gains by establishing connections between herself in the United States and her ancestors in Vietnam. By contrast though, Smithers's essay does not look beyond the...