In Defense of Flogging (5 page)

In response to this gulag, this inmate organized—which is no easy task in solitary confinement—a hunger strike of nine hundred prisoners. The strike was specifically to protest a policy that isolated inmates for indefinite periods when they were labeled, often anonymously and sometimes erroneously, as gang members. “The only way for a validated gang member to be released from a SHU,” wrote one journalist, “was to be paroled, die, go insane or become an informant on other prisoners.” Without even the lip service of rehabilitation—the more
modern term for the eighteenth-century notion of “curing” criminality—long-term indefinite isolation has become the ultimate punishment.

Ironically, a professor dedicated to crime prevention and prison reform unwittingly helped destroy the rehabilitative ideal. Robert Martinson was so dedicated to social justice that, as a graduate student in 1961, he was a Freedom Rider jailed in Mississippi as part of a “jail-in,” a novel idea to deliberately fill the state's jails. Martinson's national fame came later, with a multiauthored, 735-page tome rather academically titled
The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies
. The authors, in what is now known as a meta-analysis, looked at existing research and concluded that, statistically speaking, nothing was a proven success. They issued that most academic of clichés: a call for further study. But Martinson, known for his fondness for the media, wasn't done. His 1974
Public Interest
article on the subject, “What Works?,” became known in policy circles as “Nothing Works!” With that moniker, the press misinterpreted Martinson and academics viciously attacked him.

Martinson never believed “nothing works,” but he knew damn well that
prisons
do not work. Like many reformers, Martinson just wanted
effective
rehabilitation. But unlike many reformers, Martinson was brutally honest about existing failures. “The press,” he later conceded, “has no time for scientific quibbling and got to the heart of the matter better than I did.” As such, “nothing works” became the very successful battle cry for the political opposition eager to lock up more people and warehouse them. In the end, the City College of New York denied tenure to the coauthor of what has been called “the most politically important criminological study of the past half century,” and, though presumably there were other contributing factors, Martinson killed himself by jumping out a Manhattan window.

Throughout human history, people have devised truly ingenious and absolutely horrifying ways to punish. Today it's nearly impossible to think of a never-tried form of torture: Amputation, boiling, branding, burning, crucifixion, drowning, freezing, impaling, quartering alive, squeezing, stretching,
and suffocating are just starters. In Thailand, for instance, criminals once were squeezed inside a wicker ball, known as the elephant ball, which had nails pointing inward. Then—and here's where they get points for inventiveness—elephants would kick the ball-encased person down a field. But even societies that gleefully hurt others rarely if ever placed a human being in a cell for punishment. Consequently, that we accept prisons as normal is a historical oddity. But it's doubtful that rulers who skinned people alive would think a prison cell was too harsh; it's more likely they just thought it made no sense to pay good money to confine a person in a cell, especially when various forms of corporal punishment were faster and cheaper.

Although the harshness of our modern prison system may not bother the inventor of the elephant ball, the sadism inherent in long-term imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, should give pause to all who have the slightest bit of human empathy. Is anything worse than being entombed alive? Edgar Allan Poe may as well have been commenting on the morality of the prison system when he wrote, “To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has
ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” From this, seeing life in prison as the burial of the human soul is but a small metaphorical step. At the same time that Poe was writing, an early Sing Sing warden told inmates, “You are to be literally buried from the world.” Charles Dickens called the prison cell a “stone coffin.”

Prison is an insidious marriage of entombment and torture. Not only are inmates immured in prison, they are also subjected to never-ending physical and mental agony. Consider one California inmate's account of prison life:

The conditions in overcrowded modern prisons can be, in the starkest terms, as hellish as their early American prototypes. Bunk beds stacked within arm's reach of each other fill cells and communal sleeping rooms. Although guards may act like they're in charge, because of the sheer numbers, prisons are, in effect, run by prisoners. And without legal forms of settling disputes and conducting transactions, violence and criminality become the norm. One prisoner succinctly summed up the prisoner-survival attitude: “If I gotta survive in this environment, I gotta be bad ass.”

The risks of physical and sexual violence in prison, though sometimes overstated, are real enough: Approximately one in twenty prison inmates say they've been sexually assaulted by other inmates or staff in the past year. Because there's no permitted sexual outlet (even masturbation is against the rules), there's a lot of sexual aggression. And yet we still joke about prison rape. An online article, presumably written by a correctional officer, describes the realities of prison rape:

In what is perhaps the most graphic depiction of prison sex to reach the American public, comedian Chris Rock popularized an account of life behind bars that was so over the top it became known as the “Tossed Salad Man.” The original (decidedly noncomedic) version appeared in an HBO documentary in which one large and charismatic gay prisoner described his modus operandi in all-too-clear terms: “First of all, if he's a newcomer, I want him to suck my ass with jelly. That's the slang word, tossing
salad. It means sucking my ass, right? With jelly or without jelly. Some people prefer syrup. I prefer the guy to use jelly.” According to the prisoner, the nominally straight man can at least pretend he's licking a woman. The prisoner then attempts to reassure the viewer: “It's clean. The person is decent.” Chris Rock declared the Tossed Salad Man a greater deterrent to crime than the death penalty. And yet although most of us would never wish this sort of experience on another human being, by allowing the prison system to continue unchecked, we effectively do just that.

Without gang protection or a long-term committment to solitary confinement, the danger of sexual assault is ever-present. Take this account from another inmate:

Faced with this predicament, some prisoners submit to semiconsensual sexual acts. Still others simply make do with whatever options are available.

The perpetual threat of violence, sexual or otherwise, is interspersed with long periods of monotony. This account comes from an online prisoner message board:

In response to boredom and fear, many prisoners turn to drugs and alcohol to pass the time. Drugs,
smuggled in by guards and visitors alike, are readily available in prison (the inability to keep even prisons free of drugs is perhaps the best illustration of the futility of the war on drugs). One prison dealer estimated that 75 percent of prisoners get high. He put it this way:

If you're stuck in prison, why
wouldn't
you take drugs? What else are you going to do?

Prisoners seek out the standard recreational drugs, particularly marijuana, alcohol, and heroin, as well as legal prescribed pharmaceuticals, which have the added benefit of being free when administered by medical staff. In prison, drugs get marked up anywhere from five to forty times their street value, with the price generally rising with increased
distance from a big city. Payment happens in cash (which is also illegally smuggled into prisons), commissary accounts, and any material possession, as well as through nonincarcerated friends. “I mean,” says one drug dealer, “how would you pay if you owed me money and you were in prison, and you were scared for your life? You'd pay the best way you knew how. You would call your people: ‘Get me some money down here.' You'd find family from somewhere to get you some money down here.” But if you can't pay? “You'd become my”—this is how the drug dealer puts it—“something like a jail slave. Every time you get paid, it would go to me. Until I feel as though the debt is paid.” Compared to this, flogging looks better and better. Undoubtedly flogging is no dream, but at least it won't put you in deeper debt.

To outsiders, prison is a black box, a mystery of hellish proportions. To inmates, it's still hellish, but much less of a mystery. Prison is like spending years in a torture chamber, but with a higher risk of catching a communicable disease. If we really wanted to punish people with something worse than flogging, we could sentence drug offenders to join gangs and fear for their lives; we could punish
child abusers to torture followed by death; we could force straight men to have semiconsensual prisongay sex. But we don't because we're better than that. Or at least we like to think so. All these things already happen, but we just sweep them under the rug and look the other way.

The numbers that describe the criminal justice system in America are not encouraging—but you didn't really think they would be, did you? In the nation's largest seventy-five counties, fifty-eight thousand defendants are charged with felonies each year, half of whom have multiple prior convictions. Of the accused, four in ten are charged with drug crimes, three in ten with property crimes, two in ten with violent crimes, and one in ten with a public order offense. Forty percent of suspects are kept in jail awaiting adjudication, while the rest pay bail or are released on their own recognizance (of those released, about a third get into more trouble before their case comes up).