Prisoner Abuse Research Articles

'Your Old Road is/Rapidly Agin': International Human Rights Standards and Their Impact on Forensic Psychologists, the Practice of Forensic Psychology, and the Conditions of Institutionalization of Persons with Mental Disabilities

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Lynn Stuart Weiss lecture at the American Psychological Association yearly conference, sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Psychology Foundation, August 2016, Denver, Colorado.For years, considerations of the relationship between international human rights standards and the work of forensic psychologists have focused on the role of organized psychology in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghirab. That issue has been widely discussed and debated, and these discussions show no sign of abating. But there has been virtually no attention given to another issue of international human rights, one that grows in importance each year: how the treatment (especially, the institutional treatment) of persons with mental and intellectual disabilities violates international human rights law, and the silence of organized forensic psychology in the face of this mistreatment. This issue has become even more pointed in recent years, following the ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Organized forensic psychology has remained largely silent about the potential significance of this Convention and about how it demands that we rethink the way we institutionalize persons – often in brutal and barbaric conditions – around the world. In many parts of the world, circumstances are bleak: services are provided in segregated settings that cut people off from society, often for life; persons are arbitrarily detained from society and committed to institutions without any modicum of due process; individuals are denied the ability to make choices about their lives when they are put under plenary guardianship; there is a wide-spread denial of appropriate medical care or basic hygiene in psychiatric facilities, individuals are subject to powerful and often-dangerous psychotropic medications without adequate standards, and there is virtually no human rights oversight and enforcement mechanisms to protect against the broad range of institutional abuse. Although there is a robust literature developing – interestingly, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, but little in the US – about how such institutional conditions violate the international human rights of this population, virtually nothing has been written about how organized forensic psychology has been silent about these abuses.In this paper, I (1) discuss the relevant international human rights law that applies to these questions, (2) examine the current state of conditions in institutions worldwide, (3) argue why forensic psychology needs to become more aggressively involved in this area, and (4) offer some suggestions as to how this situation can be ameliorated.

British torture in the 'war on terror'.

Despite long-standing allegations of UK involvement in prisoner abuse during counterterrorism operations as part of the US-led ‘war on terror’, a consistent narrative emanating from British government officials is that Britain neither uses, condones nor facilitates torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. We argue that such denials are untenable. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that Britain has been deeply involved in post-9/11 prisoner abuse, and we can now provide the most detailed account to date of the depth of this involvement. We argue that it is possible to identify a peculiarly British approach to torture in the ‘war on terror’, which is particularly well-suited to sustaining a narrative of denial. To explain the nature of UK involvement, we argue that it can be best understood within the context of how law and sovereign power have come to operate during the ‘war on terror’. We turn here to the work of Judith Butler, and explore the role of Britain as a ‘petty sovereign’, operating under the state of exception established by the US executive. UK authorities have not themselves suspended the rule of law so overtly; indeed, they have repeatedly insisted on their commitment to it. Nevertheless, they have been able to construct a rhetorical, legal and policy ‘scaffold’ that has enabled them to demonstrate at least procedural adherence to human rights norms while, at the same time, allowing UK officials to acquiesce in the arbitrary exercise of sovereignty over individuals who are denied any access to appropriate representation or redress in compliance with the rule of law.

Political imprisonment and the sanctity of death: performing heritage in ‘Troubled’ Ireland

The ‘Troubles’ is a euphemism associated with sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Similarly, that term also is used to depict turmoil in all of Ireland between 1916 through 1924. During both eras, political imprisonment coupled with various forms of political violence (e.g. bombings, executions, and prisoner abuse) marred Irish society in ways that invoke socio-religious meaning. In particular, the sanctity of death captures the intense semiotics of those events and points to further theorising along lines of the Durkheimian tradition. As we shall examine herein, violations of the sanctity of death compound social conflict and the resistance it creates. Fieldwork was undertaken in Dublin and Belfast where official landmarks were explored in-depth: Kilmainham Gaol and the Crumlin Road Prison, respectively. Additionally in Belfast, other – unofficial – cultural sites provide further evidence of socio-religious symbolism, most notably the Irish Republican History Museum, Roddy McCorley’s Club in West Belfast, and murals in both Loyalist and Republican communities. Whereas Durkeimian theory remains at the forefront of the analysis, insights also are informed by heritage studies, in particular notions of cultural performance in contested societies.

Life and death in captivity: the abuse of prisoners during war

Life and death in captivity: the abuse of prisoners during war

Etiology/Assessment/Redress: Criminal Bodies and State Impunity

This article develops a theoretical model for analyzing punishment across cultures, with emphasis on its utility for parsing state‐inflicted punishment. I suggest that a tripartite relationship can be observed in justice systems across cultures, and identify an inherent consistency among what a particular culture considers a social breach (etiology), the process of determining the social significance of a breach (assessment), and the array of actions deemed appropriate in response (redress). Drawing on a familiar example from mainstream news—the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal—I demonstrate how the model works, and argue that this example is especially useful for understanding punishment in the context of the state because it highlights how the state deflects criticism (and indeed punishment) by conjuring hegemonic discourse about punishment, the autonomous moral individual, and personal accountability. Americans responding to news about Abu Ghraib generally agree that terrible things happened at this U.S. military facility in Iraq. However, the language used in the media and in the courtroom to describe what crimes were committed (and therefore what punishments should be dispensed) was inherently inadequate to identify breaches—or to coalesce around redressive actions—that transcend individual bodies. [crime and punishment, culpability, individualism, the state, Abu Ghraib]

Abu Ghraib, 2004: Doctrinal Confusion of American Military Police

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 was one of the worst and most widely talked-about cases of prisoner abuse by American forces during any war. This scandal had lasting implications for the War in Iraq and America's War on Terror as a whole. This essay examines what failures in military doctrine led to such egregious abuses and how those failures have or have not been remedied.

Book Review: Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, by Errol Morris

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. Errol Morris. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 310 pp. $40 hbk. $25 ppk.Anyone who makes a living teaching others to write well eventually confronts the great imponderable: Can curiosity-the foundation of all good thinking and writing- be taught? Like all hard questions, this one comes wrapped in related unknowns: if authentic inquisitiveness really can be taught, what are the best ways to do it? Has the Digital Age blunted or enhanced curiosity? And if curiosity is a fixed trait-no different, say, than a genetic predisposition to heart disease-then what are mass media courses teaching anyway?Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning film director, delivers a hopeful answer. In a series of opinion essays first published on the New York Times website, Morris analyzes (and re-analyzes and analyzes again) a set of photographs from the Crimean War, the Civil War, two Mideast wars, and the war on Depression Era poverty. Many readers will recognize these images. Consider Illustration 62. shows former Army reservist Sabrina Harman, smiling and giving a thumbs-up as she poses beside a corpse at Abu prison in Iraq.You know this picture; maybe it feels too familiar to wring much new information from. And you would be wrong, as Morris thoroughly, thoughtfully, and very engagingly shows.Torture and abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in 2003 and the meaning of photographs they made are the subject of Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Believing Is Seeing reconsiders the Abu images in a section called Will the real hooded man please stand up? Writing instructors seeking to use Morris as a field guide to curiosity may wish to start with the hooded man and his eternally outstretched bare hands. Because Abu and the prison scandal are a recent mass media experience, students may find this section more potent compared with Morris's investigations of older history.Especially helpful to students wondering how curiosity starts, Morris documents the chronology of his thinking and follows it, breadcrumb like, until logical resolution emerges. Each case study reminds us that a dedication to truth seeking, especially the type demanded of journalists in a meme-saturated world, depends on an unwillingness to accept things as they seem. Here is how his interest in the hooded man was rekindled: It was arguably one of the least newsworthy pictures in the world, if only because it had already been seen by everybody. Published March 11, 2006, on the front page of the New York Times, the hooded man image this time was a photo within a photo: was held by a gray-haired man identified as Ali Shalal Qaissi, the symbol of Abu Ghraib who, the Times said, was speaking out to spare others his nightmare. …

Mobilizing Evidence: Reflections on Policy Sociology

This reflection offers considerations of a career in policy sociology. The author reflects on the role of the policy sociologist and the research produced for policy. Three examples of sociological practice focus on the sociologist as offering actionable evidence for nongovernmental organizations, as evaluator of prison and substance abuse treatment programs, and as watchdog for government accountability. Thoughts are offered on training for a career in policy sociology, as well as caution to remain reflexive and critically aware of bias sources.

El alcaide y la cárcel de la Chancillería de Valladolid a finales del siglo XVIII. Usos y abusos

Este trabajo se adentra en el estudio de la cárcel y su alcaide, vistos como agente y espacio jurisdiccional que forman parte de la maquinaria de un tribunal, en concreto del de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, y que han sido concebidos para estar a su servicio. De tal manera, que son sus Alcaldes del Crimen los que articulan con sus autos el funcionamiento del espacio carcelario, pero a su autoridad se le superpone en lo cotidiano la directa del alcaide. La organización de este espacio, el uso y el abuso de la condición del alcaide, los elementos de que se sirve para llevar a cabo sus funciones, la conflictividad en este recinto y los intentos de fuga son actores del análisis concreto de una práctica carcelaria, en un momento en que la teoría sobre el delito y la pena, y el papel de las cárceles se está revisando en toda Europa.

‘Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison

����� ��� The revelation of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib during the spring and summer of 2004 confronted U.S. Americans with the devastating repercussions of the Bush administration’s foreign policy after the attacks of 11 September 2001. The photographs from Abu Ghraib presented critical thinkers with a number of moral and aesthetic problems. They forced us to ask how one could reconcile the ideology of spreading democracy with the practices of rendition, extrajudicial incarceration, and torture. The photographs also made us ponder how suffering and death caused by torture could be discussed in non-voyeuristic ways. The collective witnessing in 2011 of the tenth anniversary of ‘9/11,’ including the many efforts to memorialize the attacks by framing them within narratives of U.S.American exceptionalism, demonstrated the continued pertinence of these issues. This essay employs J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace, as an intertext to ‘read’ photos of prisoner abuse and torture from Abu Ghraib.1Working through the novel’s treatment of animals and figurations of animality demonstrates how humans displace human forms of violence onto non-human animals in order to exculpate themselves from responsibility. The representation of Disgrace’s David Lurie’s and other characters’ recourse to animal metaphors and metonyms to justify human cruelty illustrates the type of thinking that lay at the basis of treat

Post-ethical society: the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the moral failure of the secular

We've all seen the images from Abu Ghraib: stress positions, US soldiers kneeling on the heads of prisoners, and dehumanizing pyramids formed from black-hooded bodies. We have watched officials elected to our highest offices defend enhanced interrogation in terms of efficacy and justify drone strikes in terms of retribution and deterrence. But the mainstream secular media rarely addresses the morality of these choices, leaving us to ask individually: Is this right? In this singular examination of the American discourse over war and torture, Douglas V. Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, Julia Hagemann May, and Alexander Jenkins investigate the opinion pages of American newspapers, television commentary, and online discussion groups to offer the first empirical study of the national conversation about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib a year later. Post-Ethical Society is not just another shot fired in the ongoing culture war between conservatives and liberals, but a pensive and ethically engaged reflection of America's feelings about itself and our actions as a nation. And while many writers and commentators have opined about our moral place in the world, the vast amount of empirical data amassed in Post-Ethical Society sets it apart - and makes its findings that much more damning.

Scandal and military mediatization

Mediated responses to reports of abuse during the Global War on Terror are puzzling. Few of the many revelations of abuse prompted concerted reactions (e.g. scandals), and those that did were often very similar to reports that were ignored. This article draws from empirical research into responses to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to develop new concepts that help untangle the mediatization of American wars. Feedback helps to model the variety of polemical interventions that are adopted in public discussions as a result of a scandal. The concept of feedforward, introduced here, enables us to model polemical interventions that develop within an organization in response to such feedback. Together, these concepts encourage greater sensitivity to the cultural horizon of mediated events. Further, they point to a new theoretical focus for mediatization research, namely the cycles of feedback and feedforward that help shape new forms of understanding and behaving within organizations.

“The savage reduction of the flesh”:1 violence, gender and bodily weaponisation in the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strike protest

This article examines the relationship between performativity, the body and violent identity politics in HMP Maze from 1976 to 1981. In it, I outline a theory of ethnic violence that highlights the exposure of the body to abjection, focusing specifically on the violence against the bodies of Irish Republican hunger strikers during the protest of 1981. I pursue two lines of argument. First, that self-starvation was a means by which the hunger strikers could turn their bodies into weapons, rather than serving as the site of a passive or non-violent protest. Second, while the sexualised abuse of prisoners sought to feminise them, I conclude that the Hunger Strike Protest not only weaponised the bodies of the strikers, but also re-constituted them as masculine.

EPA-1066 – Pathway of removal of clonazepam in an italian prison: methods and outcome indexes.

Substance abuse and drug dependence are frequently observed among inmates. Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine approved only for treatment of epilepsy. Despite this, often correctional health care professionals inappropriately prescribed high doses of Clonazepam for the treatment of anxiety and insomnia in prison. It has therefore emerged as a drug of abuse in prison. In this study we describe the pathway of removal of Clonazepam in an Italian prison. First, all correctional health care professionals, together with psychiatrist, met to discuss the opportunity and the way to remove this drug from the formulary, considering the clinical and environmental impact on doing this. Psychiatrist recommended guidelines for substitution with others benzodiazepines if necessary. During the next year (2012) we observed differences in the prescription of benzodiazepines and modifications in inmates behavior (as self-injury, aggressiveness or suicidal behavior), if any. Moreover, we registered if antipsychotics and antidepressant medications were necessary to manage the patients during the removal. We considered the mean number of the inmates in 2011 (n=348) and in 2012 (n=342). Drug doses are reported in number of tablets. In 2012, the use of Clonazepam, limited to the treatment of epilepsy, reduced (from about 47.000 to 140 tablets) whereas the use of Delorazepam and Triazolam increased. The consumption of other benzodiazepines, antipsychotics and antidepressant medications remained substantially unchanged. Also frequency of suicidal and self-injurious behaviors did not change. These conclusions support the decision to remove clonazepam for the treatment of anxiety or sleep disorders in prison.

Reconciling the Past: Torture's Place in US Policy

The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners After 9/11. By David P. Forsythe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 315 pp., $29.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-18110-5). Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. By W. McCoy Alfred. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2012. 401 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-299-28854-9). Can a country confront its past and change the norms that guide its policy decisions? The controversy surrounding the United States' detention and interrogation policies during the War on Terror has provided ample opportunity to engage this question and discuss what these policies mean to US security, values, and legitimacy. The “enhanced” interrogation techniques championed by the George W. Bush administration, the use of offshore detention sites, and the establishment of military commissions attracted media and scholarly attention and spurred vigorous debate over the legality and morality of US policy (Danner 2004; Sands 2008; Wittes 2008). As we gain some distance from the immediate post-9/11 period, researchers are now able to analyze how abusive tactics came to be a tool of the US government and compare the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. Two recent books on US abuse of detainees delve into the policies that began under the Bush administration and reverberated into the Obama years in order to extract some lessons about how we arrived at these policies, how these policies have shaped the politics and culture of the United States, and how we should move forward. David P. Forsythe's The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners After 9/11 and Alfred W. McCoy's Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation draw upon an abundant body of research from the pre- and post-Bush administration periods to provide comprehensive analyses of law, torture, and post-9/11 policy. As the authors construct windows into the creation and implementation of detainee policy, they present incisive, thorough critiques of Bush administration actions and the nagging impunity that has followed. In asking how detainee policy was constructed, they also grapple with the more difficult question of whether the United States can confront the role of torture …

Public Health and Safety Consequences of Denying Access to Justice for Victims of Prison Staff Sexual Misconduct

This article juxtaposes the rationales provided by prosecutors for not prosecuting staff sexual misconduct and Congress in passing the Prison Litigation Reform Act against the public health and safety consequences of ignoring staff sexual abuse of prisoners.

Public Health and Safety Consequences of Denying Access to Justice for Victims of Prison Staff Sexual Misconduct

This article juxtaposes the rationales provided by prosecutors for not prosecuting staff sexual misconduct and Congress in passing the Prison Litigation Reform Act against the public health and safety consequences of ignoring staff sexual abuse of prisoners.

Militarised violences, basic training, and the myths of asexuality and discipline

AbstractIn recent years numerous reports of prisoner abuse and other militarised violences by British troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged. Drawing on two such incidents – the abuse of detainees at Camp Breadbasket and the murder of Baha Mousa – this article seeks to locate such violences on a continuum that can be traced back to the ways in which British soldiers are trained. Following on from a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities, and using Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I suggest a conceptual and methodological intervention into the subject that resists generalised stories and the mapping of ‘hard’ borders. Focusing on the myths of asexuality and discipline that emerge from, and reinforce, the gendered discourses of basic training, I conduct a ‘ghost hunt’ of the haunting spectres that have attempted to be exorcised from these myths. Making visible these ghost(s) and tracing their (violent) materialisations through multiple sites and across a continuum, militarised violences – in all their ranges – begin to be made explicable.

The 'Worst': A Closer Look at Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment

Both international and domestic laws have long forbidden the abuse and torture of prisoners. Specifically, international law forbids 'cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,' a form of illegal abuse that has no codified definition in international law. In this dissertation chapter, I argue that many courts and scholars have failed to adequately conceptualize this prohibition, mistakenly lumping inhuman and degrading treatment under the category of cruelty. I conclude that because of this blurring of the distinction between cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the scope of the treatment that is understood to be legally prohibited has been unnecessarily narrowed, permitting many forms of institutional abuse to remain unrecognized by courts. I also conclude that this narrow approach overlooks many forms of institutional treatment that should be prohibited, in part for legal consistency, and in part to safeguard the wellbeing of prisoners. Drawing on 78 interviews with former Guantanamo detainees, I demonstrate that “the worst” prison treatment, for many prisoners, is not physical cruelty as often assumed, but treatment that can be categorized as inhuman and/or degrading, and thus that these phenomena are necessarily distinct. Based on this finding, I make the normative argument that society’s understanding of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment must be refined and reconsidered, if some of the worst prison-based atrocities are to be avoided.

ENTERTAINING TORTURE, EMBODYING LAW

Torture appears as an image: once, of sovereign power, more recently, of acts performed on people not even defined as prisoners. It served to instruct, now it serves to entertain, as image and spectacle. Law's entertaining of torture both enables the spectacles seen (and not seen) since Abu Ghraib, and intersects with wider cultural practices, especially in cinema and television. Torture has been a form of entertainment as much as it has been a subject of revulsion. Recent justifications of torture have sought cinematic backing. The US Justice Department torture memos, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and beyond, link attitudes towards torture with a culture of entertainment and spectacle, up to the point at which the law comes to entertain torture. At stake in both spectacle and actual practices is a form of corporeal sovereignty: the wholeness of the sovereign against the brokenness of any body that would threaten such wholeness. This paper explores these intersections, along with the logic of a sovereign disregard for the body, through readings of the torture memos, First Blood, and the investigations into prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.