Cruel Isolation Indeed

Let’s agree on one thing first–some people do horrible things and need to be punished. That’s what prison is for. But punishment should not extend to mental torture, the kind caused by solitary confinement. Every study shows that people need contact with other people to remain sane. It is one thing to serve a prison sentence; it is torture to also add solitary confinement.

Is this what we’ve come to as a country? Are we so callous and indifferent to people–especially criminals–that we allow this? Let’s stop this now.

Read the excellent editorial in The New York Times (below) and tell someone about it. If enough people decide to care, we will stop being the kind of people that permit torture.

 

CRUEL TORTURE

For many decades, the civilized world has recognized prolonged isolation of prisoners in cruel conditions to be inhumane, even torture. The Geneva Conventions forbid it. Even at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and physically abused systematically and with official sanction, the jailers had to get permission of their commanding general to keep someone in isolation for more than 30 days.

So Americans should be disgusted and outraged that prolonged solitary confinement, sometimes for months or even years, has become a routine form of prison management. It is inflicting unnecessary, indecent and inhumane suffering on tens of thousands of prisoners.

The issue came to the fore most recently because of a three-week hunger strike by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in California near the Oregon border that began on July 1 in the Orwellian Security Housing Unit, where inmates are held in wretched isolation in small windowless cells for more than 22 hours a day, some for many years.

Possessions, reading material, exercise and exposure to natural light and the outside are severely restricted. Meals are served through slots in steel cell doors. There is little in the way of human interaction. Returning to the general prison population is often conditioned on inmates divulging information on other gang members, putting themselves in jeopardy.

How inmates in these circumstances communicated to organize the protest is unclear, but it quickly spread to other California prisons. About 6,600 inmates participated at its peak. California’s huge prison system is dysfunctional in so many ways. In May, the Supreme Court found conditions at the overcrowded prisons so egregious that they violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the state to cut its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. The case did not address the issue of long-term solitary confinement.

With their health deteriorating, those inmates continuing to fast resumed eating after state prison officials met a few modest demands. Inmates in Pelican Bay’s isolation unit will get wool caps for cold weather, wall calendars to mark the passing time and some educational programming. Prison officials said current isolation and gang management policies are under review. But the protest has raised awareness about the national shame of extended solitary confinement at Pelican Bay and at high-security, “supermax” prisons all around the country.

Once used occasionally as a short-term punishment for violating prison rules, solitary confinement’s prevalent use as a long-term prison management strategy is a fairly recent development, Colin Dayan, a professor at Vanderbilt University, said in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times. Nationally, more than 20,000 inmates are confined in “supermax” facilities in horrid conditions.

Prison officials claim the treatment is necessary for combating gang activity and other threats to prison order. It is possible to maintain physical separation of prisoners without ultraharsh levels of deprivation and isolation. Mississippi, which once set the low bar for terrible prison practices, saw a steep reduction of prison violence and ample monetary savings when it dramatically cut back on long-term solitary several years ago.

Holding prisoners in solitary also is very expensive, and several other states have begun to make reductions. In any case, decency requires limits. Resorting to a dehumanizing form of punishment well known to induce suffering and drive people into mental illness is beyond them.

Guilty, Despite Prosecutorial Misconduct

John Thompson asks an excellent question in his heartfelt article in The New York Times on April 10, 2011: Why no penalty for those who put an innocent man on death row?

After spending 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row, he’s been free since 2003. In March 2011 the Supreme Court overturned a case Thompson had won against the district attorney for failure to turn over exculpatory evidence.

In technical language, the Supreme Court  case considered whether a prosecutor’s office can be held liable for a single Brady violation by one of its members on the theory that the office provided inadequate training. The Court voted no, 5-4.

Although this case was argued on a technical issue, the real issue is capital punishment. The district attorney was able to argue for the death penalty because of the prior, faulty robbery conviction. If the death penalty was not an option, this mischief could not have happened.

As Americans we have not reconciled our bloodlust for punishing wrongdoers with the morality of respecting life–all life, even the life of convicted murderers. Life in prison allows for moral rehabilitation, penitence if you will. Death does not.

Free to Let Go and Enjoy Life

Before reading Jim Dwyer’s column remembering John Sullivan, an advocate for homeless who died of cancer, I had not heard of him. His story is not one of dramatic heroism or grand gestures, but of a life lived with personal struggles tempered with the heart to help others. I admire him for his courage to live a life that meant something to him, forsaking the “fine living that gave him lots of travel and a closet full of Brooks Brothers clothes.”

Mr. Sullivan left one scrap of paper, torn from a book on recovery, that his former wife and mother of his son found. It asked, “what if we were liberated from worrying about things that cannot be controlled? We’d be free to let go and enjoy life.”

Death Penalty Kills Truth

“California may be about to execute an innocent man,” is the provocative opening sentence of Nicholas Kristof’s 12/8/2010 column. He writes about the death penalty case of Kevin Cooper, a black man who faces lethal injection for allegedly murdering a white family, and the attempts by the federal circuit court judges to stop the execution of a man most likely framed by police.

Apparently, all judicial avenues are exhausted–it’s not clear why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to rehear this case–and the execution is moving inexorably to its conclusion. I cannot judge whether the facts presented by Mr. Kristof or the police are correct, but I can judge that the State should not execute someone when there is doubt. Life imprisonment is a better solution than execution simply because it does not end a life, or the attempt to arrive at truth and justice.

The Governor of California can commute the sentence. Will Governor Schwarzenegger do the right thing? Or will time run out on his term and it will be up to the new Governor Brown?

In a country founded on the ideal that we are innocent until proven guilty, it is not acceptable to execute people, and then after the fact, discover they were innocent. By then, the truth, and the defendant, have been killed, along with the ideals of this country.

It is more harmful to our country to keep executing people than it is to enact life imprisonment, for the sole reason that sometimes the system gets it wrong.

United States Supreme Court–are you listening? End capital punishment. There is no way to ensure that the convictions are 100% accurate, which means we will execute innocent people.

Punish the guilty but do not execute the guilty–or the innocent.

Obama Is the New Comeback Kid

President Obama, with the signing of the tax bill today, has wrested the “Comeback Kid” moniker from former President Clinton, after both of their disastrous midterm results, and midcourse corrections. Obama’s re-election campaign is officially now underway.

The question remains, what else will Obama compromise to be re-elected? President Clinton’s strategy of triangulation worked because he was at heart a moderate. Obama isn’t, so it’s hard to see him taking away Henry Clay’s legacy as the “Great Compromiser.” Henry Clay also quipped, “I’d rather be right than President.”

Obama is no Henry Clay. Obama has made it very clear he’d rather be President than right, I mean, liberal.

America is Confused About Which Principles Matter

America as a country is confused today about what it stands for. Joe Nocera’s column in The New York Times reports on the trial of the Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the trumped up charges that took his oil company away from him and put him into prison.

At his trial, Khodorkovsky gave an impassioned speech about principles, and said, “The things I believe in are worth dying for.” How many of us Americans remember the things worth dying for, the principles that are ancestors sacrificed their blood and money for?

If we know anything about the banality of evil, it is that small decisions add up to large actions. Pricewaterhouse, as the accounting firm for the oil company taken away from Khodorkovsky, had the opportunity to stand by its ten years of audits. But under pressure from Putin and Russia, they disavowed their own auditors’ results, giving validity to the trumped up charges against Khodorkovsky.

Pricewaterhouse defines the banality of evil, caring more about profits than principle.

What has been America’s response to this outrageous trial? Nothing. No comment from President Obama. That is wrong. We should be supporting him. He is fighting for political freedom and the rule of law, putting his life on the line for ideals we claim to hold dear. “He has become a prisoner of conscience and he deserves the sympathy and help of the world community,” according to Elie Wiesel.

We laughed in 1996 when Bob Dole kept saying, “where is the outrage?” But I laugh no more. When the world stands idly by, evil wins. And it won’t be too long before the government in America challenges rule of law, and we find ourselves imprisoned like Khodorkovsky. Maybe he is the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of our time.

Are We Reasonable or Emotional?

David Brooks claims that the “children of the British Enlightenment” are in retreat, but that “the Scots were right and the French were wrong.” Brooks points out in his May 25 column that there were two versions of the Enlightenment, the French, who believed in reason, and the British (Scots) who emphasized its limits–that we are ruled by our sentiments.

So why does this matter? Where you come down on this point determines how you think government should act in any given situation. If you agree with Edmund Burke that we are emotional creatures first, and foremost, then you will want to tread carefully with change. “If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated then you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.”

My take is that both the self-confident Democrat technocrats and the self-described conservative radical Tea Party folks are wrong. Our country needs a modest, gradual, balanced approach that builds on our past. Nothing radical.

Immigration Reform

Once again Nina Bernstein exposes the idiocy of our immigration policies, and unintentionally, the dark side of government power. She writes about the bizarre case of Caroline Jamieson’s attempt to get a green card for her husband, Herve Takoulo, an engineer and citizen of Cameroon. After Ms. Jamieson wrote the President for help, the letter was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who promptly arrested Mr. Takoulu.

This is a shocking breach of a citizen’s right to write to elected government officials without fear of reprisals. How can people ask for help if the act of asking for help gets them arrested?

Fortunately for Mr. Takoulu his wife knew how to attract attention to his case–she works at Digitas, a new media advertising agency–and apparently he will be given his green card.

Immigration reform is complex, and it’s cases like these that underscore the urgency of fixing the many wrongs in the current system.

Killing Small Businesses

In cases you didn’t read the entire healthcare bill (did anyone?), one provision will certainly hurt small businesses. Starting in 2012, all businesses will be required to issue 1099-MISC forms to every vendor where they spend more than $600.

Congressman Dan Lungren of California is fighting back. He introduced  ”The Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act” which will remove section 9006 of H.R. 3590.

My last post talked about the long-term goal of making all spending trackable, i.e., to improve the government’s ability to collect taxes–and information.

I also speculated that a small business with 50 vendors would need one full day to fill out all of these forms, or spend $1000 with an accountant.

One thing I didn’t mention was the unintended consequence of vendor consolidation. Many businesses will cut their small vendors and purchase many things from a few big vendors.

Not only will this hurt small businesses with the burdensome, costly paperwork requirement to “prove” the expenses they already deduct, but it will force many small businesses out of business when they are cut from the vendor list of many companies that don’t want to deal with the paperwork of too many vendors.

I can see the attractiveness of grabbing an alleged $17 billion in additional tax revenues, presumably from tax cheats. But what I can’t understand is why the government is using such a heavy handed approach with so many detrimental consequences.

Why not hire a few more auditors and check more tax returns for cheating? Our tax system works on the honor system. Let’s continue to treat small businesses with honor and repeal this misguided legislation.

Tracking Spending to Collect Taxes

Buried in the recent healthcare reform bill was a new requirement that all businesses issue 1099-MISC forms for purchases totaling over $600 in one year. Under the current rules payments to corporations over $600 were excluded, as the main purpose was to report independent contractor income.

Some commentators have stated that this is not a big deal, as the honest small businesses are already reporting their income and expenses. That is true, although I estimate it will add a paperwork burden of about 10 minutes per vendor. For small businesses with about 50 vendors, that’s a full day’s work or about an extra $1000 for an accountant. That’s not trivial to small businesses.

It will have the side benefit of slowing down tax cheats that claim fictitious expenses. Although it will probably increase tax receipts, this reporting requirement is not a new tax, it is simply better, albeit more expensive, enforcement of current tax laws.

But that’s not the real issue. Tracking spending is the real issue. The government would like to know the details of everything you earn and spend, ostensibly to collect the correct taxes.

On a side note, they cannot do that if you spend with paper money. Our credit and debit cards are fantastic for the government because they create a paper trail of our spending and lifestyle. The new 1099-MISC requirements foreshadow the end of paper money (not trackable), at least for US citizens. Our government makes too much money by being the world’s reserve currency, so we’ll keep printing the Benjamins for foreign export.

It chills me to think of the Orwellian possibilities when the government will monitor all spending. Will we be penalized if we buy too many Double Doubles from In-N-Out Burger? Will our health insurance premiums be increased if we eat too much chocolate and not enough fiber? These may be silly examples but the road to serfdom starts with good intentions, to paraphrase Friedrich Hayek.