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Description
I entered the cell around 5 a.m. Before that, they took photos of me in degrading positions. They'd stripped me and were laughing at me. And I'd hear screaming. Men and women screaming.... I never thought I'd get out alive because they didn't give me a Red Cross number.... If someone wasn't given a number he remained in a situation of "deferred death." Everyone who wasn't given a number felt he could die in an hour, the next day, the day after (Abu Ghraib ex-detainee, Abu Maan, in Roussett, Dateline, 2005).
No beatings I'd ever suffered were as savage as those inflicted by the uniformed men who were paid to keep the peace, the prison guards.... That was the memory: being held down by three or four officers in the punishment units while two or three others worked me over with fists, batons, and boots.... It's the whole system, the whole world, that's breaking your bones. And then there was the screaming. The other men, other prisoners, screaming. Every night.... (H Division ex-prisoner, Gregory David Roberts, 2003: 143-144).
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THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT THERE ARE PERVASIVE HISTORICAL CONTINUITIES BETWEEN the brutalizing and dehumanizing practices deployed at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and domestic penal practice in Western capitalist states such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The photographic documentation of torture and sexual coercion at Abu Ghraib mobilized considerable international outrage and disgust, yet in the same instance the abuses have been conceived as "exceptional," occurring outside the boundaries of "civilized" penal practice and in the context of wartime Iraq. Critics such as Angela Davis (2005) and Avery Gordon (2006) refute such arguments, asserting such practices cannot be exceptionalized as anomalies. Rather, as Davis (2005: 49-53) argues, they must be understood as emanating from techniques of punishment "deeply embedded in the history of the institution of prison."
This article argues that although the Abu Ghraib "scandal" may have broken against the backdrop of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and the "war on terror," the practices documented in the photographs and the ensuing official distancing, justification, and denials demand critical examination in the localized context and historical continuum of racialized punishment, brutal penal practice, and the historical growth of militarized systems of punishment within domestic prison systems in the West. Moreover, it is argued that the concealed exertion of state power in the form of institutionalized coercion and racialized violence is integral to the role of the prison in historical and contemporary contexts. To elucidate these contexts and continuities, this article draws parallels and distinctions between the methods and practices deployed by the U.S. forces in Iraq and those in the Australian prison system during the 1970s. A comparative examination of psychologically and physically brutalizing practices deployed at Abu Ghraib and Victoria's Pentridge Prison H Division maximum-security unit in Australia during the 1970s therefore comprise the focus of this discussion. The nature of official responses to the exposure of atrocities at Abu Ghraib and H Division and the official construction of regimes of justification to defend these practices are also considered.
This discussion necessitates brief consideration of the progressive blurring of borders between the traditionally separate spheres of military law and civil criminal justice institutions--a trend that emerged long before the "war on terror" was declared. Evidence suggests that these borders "have been incrementally but extensively eroded over the previous three decades" (McCulloch and Carlton, 2006: 400; McCulloch, 2001). Scholars such as McCulloch (2001) have documented the phenomenon of paramilitary policing in Western states since the 1970s to illustrate this movement. However, the much researched British occupation of Northern Ireland and political conflict there provide a further case in point. During the 1960s and 1970s, British imperial interests dictated cooperation between the branches of the military and civilian police and prison authorities as a strategy to suppress Catholic and Republican resistance in the North. The aggressive suppression of Catholic and Republican resistance took place in the localized reality of colonial occupation and civil war, yet the British worked to neutralize this reality by representing the conflict as one caused by criminal rather than political elements. Thus, while the frequent and arbitrary application of force, interrogations, and use of torture were enlisted to deal with "political terrorists," the British continued to argue that the status of Republican prisoners was criminal, not political (McKeown, 2001).
It is acknowledged that the present use of military prisons in the "war on terror" represents distinct experiences and contexts that are removed from the domestic realm of civil imprisonment and penal practice. Military prisons such as Abu Ghraib and their associated practices are justified as exceptional "emergency" measures deployed momentarily in wartime. In contrast, though coercive force deployed in civil and particularly maximum-security prisons is not strictly countenanced, it is normalized or disregarded on the basis of the violent and dangerous criminal identities caged within. The point of a comparative examination is to observe and parallel the use of brutalizing practices in Abu Ghraib and H Division, to demonstrate the proliferation of these practices over time, and to consider how they demonstrate a progressive blurring of borders between military and domestic penal practice. In focusing on the official responses to the breaking of the Abu Ghraib and H Division prisoner abuse "scandals," it is demonstrated that although the contexts and circumstances of each case are distinct, ultimately the official responses and outcomes are the same.
Disappearing Terror: The Historical Proliferation of Racialized Violence and Counterinsurgency in Penal Practice
Modern institutionalized systems of punishment have been understood to signal a shift away from brutal public spectacles aimed at the body to institutionalized psychological punishments (see Foucault, 1991; Ignatieff, 1978). Such a view is problematic in that it contributes to the erasure of practices embedded within historical and contemporary systems of punishment that target racialized and gendered bodies (Sudbury, 2005; Davis, 2005; Davis, 2003; James, 1996). Moreover, the introduction of the prison may represent a broad institutional shift toward the physical removal and symbolic erasure of prisoners from civil society, but there is much evidence to suggest this has not led to the demise of psychologically and physically brutalizing penal practice, particularly within modern maximum-security regimes (see Gordon, 2006; Davis, 2003; 2005; Rodriguez, 2003; Dayan, 2002; Churchill and Vanderwall, 1992; Scraton, Sim, and Skidmore, 1991; Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982). Rather, the shift toward the institutionalization of punishment has led only to the disappearance of such practices from public view.
Since the 1930s, maximum-security disciplinary regimes have served as a laboratory for the experimental application of a variety of psychologically and physically brutalizing technologies and practices used to maximize security and prisoner compliance (see Funnel, 2004; Rodriguez, 2003; Haney and Lynch, 1997; Ryan, 1992; Fitzgerald, 1975). Documented practices include the infliction of terror through brutal assault (Abbott, 1981; Boyle, 1977; Jenkinson, 1973-1974, Nagle, 1978), forced strip-searching, cell extractions (Minogue, 2005), and sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation (Mooney, 1985; Jenkinson 1973-1974); later, with the development of the modern U.S. control unit or supermax model, came the use of sensory deprivation, behavioral modification, and psychotropic drugs (Gordon, 2006; Rhodes, 2004; Ryan, 1992). The U.S. has served as a "global leader" in the use and export of such practices in its military and civil prisons (Gordon, 2006). As Gordon (2006: 48) states:
Torture, humiliation, degradation, sexual assault, assault with weapons and dogs, extortion, and blood sport always have been a part of U.S. prison culture and behaviour, Angola, Attica, Marion, Florence, Corcoran--the names of these prisons carry their histories in tow, in part because they broke through the invisibility barrier. They brought into public view the images and the stories of ordinary, ongoing violence and deprivation that became finally intolerable to the men who lived with them.
Mike Ryan (1992: 83-109) extends this analysis, arguing that the development and use of practices in maximum-security borrow greatly from methods and experimentation associated with counterinsurgency and political imprisonment in places such as the U.S., Eastern Europe, Korea, and Northern Ireland. Prisoners in the Marion Penitentiary control unit in the U.S. further reiterate this relationship through their description of the origins and official objectives associated with psychological conditioning, sensory deprivation, and isolation:
Military psychologists discovered in the 1950s that humans without environmental stimulation, such as seeing, hearing, and feeling, and without educational stimulation would become physically ill. For example, hallucinations, feelings of terror, persecution, complexes, and psychosomatic disturbances can occur. As well under such extreme conditions, people are more susceptible to propaganda and are generally more open to influence (cited in Ryan, 1992: 83).
Enforced isolation and idleness in solitary confinement for long and indefinite periods have been central to... |
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