Celebrated local doctor, author, and MacArthur genius grant recipient Atul Gawande argued yes, it is a form of torture, in this 2009 New Yorker piece, and went on to assert that it is also not effective, very costly, used with exceptional frequency in the United States, and more prevalent in the last 20 years than at any previous time. He also cited results from Britain that show there are more effective ways to manage prisoners.
Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald brought the issue into sharp focus this month when he observed that U.S. citizen and soldier Bradley Manning, who has not been charged with any crime, has been confined in this way for seven months: a sobering realization for anyone who considers the implications of such treatment for some of our most basic principles of justice, including military justice, such as the presumption of innocence and right to hear the charges against one before one is confined for an extended period.
Massachusetts has two Supermax prisons: Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Cedar Junction (MCI-Cedar Junction), formerly known as MCI-Walpole, where prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for years at a time, and the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. Gawande on Supermax prisons:
The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax-twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.
All of which poses a few questions: is torture routinely being practiced in the Massachusetts correctional system as part of our standard operating procedures? Even if one does not agree with Gawande’s analysis, one can still ask if the use of extended solitary confinement in Massachusetts is the most effective use of public funds. Where do Governor Patrick, our legislators, and the leaders of the state Democratic and Republican parties stand on this issue? Does anyone know?
jimc says
This is going to go Holy War pretty soon, and I am staying out when it does, but two points.
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p>- I’m pretty sure Cedar Junction aka Walpole is maximum, not supermax. And no, I don’t know the difference. The general point about crowding is probably correct.
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p>- Manning is a soldier on duty, and he is excused of a serious breach of intelligence, releasing it without authorization. I am not a lawyer, but surely the legal implications of his case are not the same as an ordinary citizen. In short he is not a great example, and discussing his case in the conext of torture, extended confinement, extraordinary rendition, or other “War on Terror” topics clouds the issue, in my view.
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bob-neer says
As to the first, Wikipedia:
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p>Mass.gov.
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p>Cedar Junction web page:
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p>As to the second, you are right: my post raises several issues:
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p>. Is extended solitary confinement torture?
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p>. Is it good public policy for Massachusetts.
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p>. Is Manning’s extended solitary confinement just since he has not been charged with any crime.
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p>Consider it an open thread about any or all of this issues, or any other relevant topics. I’d hope that there can be a reality-based discussion rather than a Holy War, as you phrase it!
kirth says
Forgive me for repeating my earlier comment on Manning’s being held without charge:
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p>Uniform Code of Military Justice
Article 10 of the UCMJ:
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If there is a legal basis for Manning’s being held without charge for seven months, no one has presented it that I’ve seen.
peter-porcupine says
ryepower12 says
The answer to your question seems to be no.
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p>Then again, he hasn’t been charged at all… maybe the military thinks so long as they don’t charge him with anything, he can be kept indefinitely? /sigh.
mannygoldstein says
That’s the crystal-clear signal that’s been sent to military, CIA, and NSA from our leaders.
jimc says
Not excused. Don’t mind me …
sabutai says
Consider yourself accused.
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p>No, wait…
tedf says
At least as of several years ago, when I was doing legal work for prisoners, I can report that Walpole was a lower security level than SBCC. And within Walpole, for example, the majority of prisoners were not housed in the 23-hr. lockdown area (I can’t remember what they called it–DDU? DSU?)
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p>The segregation areas were far and away the most dysfunctional places I’ve ever been. The prisoners are essentially driven insane. But I also want to highlight the extremely disturbing culture of the guards who spend most of their days in such areas. I thought the guards as brutal and inhuman as most of the prisoners, if not more so because of the radical imbalance in power between the two groups.
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p>I say this as a way of emphasizing the harm that supermax confinement does to people other than those who are locked up.
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p>TedF
marc-davidson says
what difference does it make what the offense or allegation is? Haven’t we been told that the US doesn’t torture detainees.
I also think Bob Woodward has names of some high-ranking officials who revealed even more sensitive information a few years ago.
What is the “Holy War” you’re referring to?
jimc says
My decision to stay out of this thread has worked out pretty well for me so far, but I’ll answer that question. “Holy War” is my term for a blog dispute that the participants take to a place where it cannot be resolved.
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p>An example would be a thread about a liberal challenge to a moderate incumbent. One faction will say, “You’re crazy! So-and-so will lose the general, and the seat will go Republican!” The other faction will say, “We can’t live with John Moderate! To do that is to accept the status quo, and we’re crazy if we do that!” So, in this example, a personal choice (which candidate to support) becomes a question of political ideology … or, in my metaphor, political theology. Minor differences between two Democratic candidates will be enlarged. The argument can’t be won until the primary takes place, so the participants in the online debate just end up going after each other.
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joets says
You don’t end up in solitary confinement at a maximum security prison for stealing bread.
christopher says
That being said solitary should be reserved for those who pose a danger to the rest of the prison population, but definitely for that purpose.
stomv says
or perhaps even a danger to those outside of the prison (leaders of very powerful gangs of assorted flavors, etc).
joets says
Those guys who raped and murdered a family in CT do. They deserve far worse, and there’s others like them out there.
christopher says
You remind me of MCRD whom we haven’t heard from in awhile. There are certain things that are just beyond the pale – period, paragraph, end of discussion – regardless of what they did to someone else. Two wrongs absolutely do not make a right!
kirth says
Every act of torture has at least two victims. The act dehumanizes both the subject and his tormentor. It also exacts a toll on the larger society. Every time torture is used, it reduces the level of civilization of our society. When torture is condoned and unpunished, it calls into question the morality of the whole of the society in which it occurs. Most people recognize this; it’s why we keep hearing our leaders saying “America does not torture” – even when they are well aware that it does.
somervilletom says
Try some word substitutions here, and see if they work:
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p>”Some people deserve to be murdered.”
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p>”Some people deserve to be mutilated.”
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p>No moral human tortures another. No moral nation tortures.
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p>Nobody “deserves to be tortured.”
joets says
If you think people who rape do not deserve torture, then we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.
somervilletom says
I guess you just skip over the last clause of the Eighth Amendment (emphasis mine):
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p>Funny, I don’t see an exclusion for rape in those words.
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p>Americans have rejected torture since our founding. Yes, almost all of us think that people who rape do not deserve torture.
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p>Yes, you and I disagree.
christopher says
From the English Bill of Rights: (1689)
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p>Similar language is also found in several other subsequent statements of human rights.
peter-porcupine says
joets says
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p>Except for that whole institutionalized slavery for a hundred years, right?
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p>oh, and just for fun
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p>That one gets ignored on a pretty routine basis.
christopher says
…until unsanctioned by the 13th amendment. Why are you being so obtuse on this thread? You’re usually pretty reasonable.
joets says
I think it was. I think it shows that yes, America has at times enthusiastically supported torture. That’s all I mean by that.
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p>I’m really not sure of what is so obtuse about thinking that we no longer have punishments that fit crimes. Thanks to laws like CCRP 701 in Louisiana, there are murderers walking the street, popped out of jail 2 months after taking someone’s life.
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p>Even now, as I watch the news, someone in providence got murdered over loud music. Shot in the chest. Are you telling me he has any fear of our justice system?
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p> Also, whether or not we actually impose torture on criminals I’m not decided on, however much I believe that the worst of the worst deserve it.
christopher says
…until the 13th amendment came along to ban it EXCEPT as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.
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p>There has to be something more to the Louisiana case than you’re telling us. States that don’t have the death penalty generally provide for life without parole for 1st degree murder. I assume the guy who shot someone over loud music is going away for a long time.
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p>Of course, as long as you believe torture is justified there’s really no point in continuing this discussion anyway.
mark-bail says
previous comments, then changed my mind, not because I agree with you, but because you raise some interesting questions for me.
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p>The problem with your statements here is that it takes complex question and gives it a thoughtless, bloodthirsty answer. It’s a Rush Limbaugh way of talking. That’s not to say you’re being an idiot, but you haven’t looked at the question in any sort of complexity.
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p>Do people deserve to be executed or tortured? It’s a complex question. If someone did to my family what those guys did in Connecticut, I might want to kill them. What would my response be? I know how I want to react, and that’s with some sort of mercy or neutrality. I’m not a pacifist. I support gun ownership. If the lives of my family were threatened, I would kill to protect them. But why should my personal feelings be a factor in someone’s execution or torture? Why should I sanction the government to execute and torture? Because I would be angry. Because they were evil?
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p>Even if they deserve torture or death, what do I deserve? What do you deserve? As Hamlet says, “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?”
joets says
That there are some crimes that are so evil, in the action and the intent, that to simply lock them away for the rest of their life, or to kill them in a manner far more painless and merciful than the manner they took lives, doesn’t do justice to the person who was victimized.
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p>Also, fact is that there a lot of people who are simply not afraid of jail anymore. In gangs, you see it all the time. Hell, the guy who killed the Woburn cop this weekend — he had a 30 year stint under his belt.
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p>Say what you want about the honor or humanity in our reluctance to put the perpetrators of heinous crimes in unimaginable pain, but I would question whether anyone is really for the better for it. We imprison more than any country aside from china, and have the most reported crimes per year worldwide.
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p>What I’m getting as is a top to bottom leniency in the system. One that treats criminals like victims and acts like criminals really are good at heart like their moms go on tv and say.
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p>If they knew the penalty for that crime would be being drawn and quartered, they might have re-evaluated that plan. Instead, that bag of horse manure gets to die quietly and comfortably. And if they did it here, the punishment would be living off my tax money, being clothed, fed, and sheltered for decades, living an existence without purpose or meaning. A mankind-imposed purgatory before Hell. They deserve torture. These guys they catch after they’ve already murdered a dozen people? They deserve torture.
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p>Yes, our constitution bans it, but that doesn’t mean the guys don’t deserve it.
christopher says
You are seeking vengeance.
ryepower12 says
whether you think they deserve it or not is immaterial.
joets says
marc-davidson says
is outside of the bounds of appropriate discussion on this forum. Please don’t encourage this with a response.
somervilletom says
If you truly believe that “some people deserve to be tortured”, then that tells me all I need to know about your personal value system.
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p>That, in turn, tells me all I need to know about the rest of your comments in this forum. I have, until now, respected your comments.
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p>I am unwilling to engage in discussion with those who defend torture.
joets says
I don’t know how you get through life without engaging in discussion with people who sit outside your realm of comfort as far as value systems go. You probably do it on a daily basis and just don’t know it. Kind of disturbing, thinking about it that way.
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p>Value-systems are also a matter of perspective. You probably view me as a cold-hearted person with little regard for whatever moral pretenses you approach life with. I see it in the light that a person’s life and body are sacred things that those who despoil it with acts of great evil shouldn’t be afforded the mercy they denied. Simple as that.
somervilletom says
I view you as a person who says, and then defends, that he believes that some people deserve to be tortured.
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p>A mathematical proof that includes a division by zero cannot produce a correct answer. Once the division by zero is shown, further analysis is a waste of effort. A value system that incorporates a defense of torture is similarly not worth further effort.
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p>I strongly encourage you to rethink your values.
howland-lew-natick says
From my experience with the criminal justice system in Massachusetts I learned that many of the people incarcerated are incorrigible. They are not reasonable people. They understand courtesy and decency as weakness and have no conscience regarding doing terrible things to others. If discipline in not maintained to prevent abusive behavior many staff and inmates may be hurt.
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p>In jails, where everyone is innocent as they haven’t been tried, punishment for ill behavior is pretty much restricted to ‘no tv’ and ‘no collect calls outside’ and restriction from interaction with other inmates. This is bad magic for most jail inmates. Once found guilty and graduated to a prison, the downside diminishes as an inmate realizes that one thing – going to prison – has already been done to him. What is the downside of bad behavior then? Is it enough to prevent a violent inmate from ripping the head off the convicted drug addict inmate in an act of immediacy?
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p>A number of potential solutions have been tried. Busy work, greater or lesser discipline and methods to get inmates out of the correction system through gaining points to parole where they are not the correction systems problem anymore.
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p>The last solution has the added bonus of freeing space for another inmate. It hasn’t worked well.
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p>Solitary? Maybe an answer to discipline problems. Maybe not. Is it torture if you know the penalty and decide to take it? Dunno.
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p>“The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.” –H L Mencken
peter-porcupine says
amberpaw says
One woman was in MCI Framingham for shoplifting; she also is bi-polar and intermittently psychotic. As you may imagine, at times her behavior is erratic. That erratic behavior led to solitary confinement, which led to suicidal psychosis and hospitalization. The “treatment” for serious mental illness in our state is often imprisonment, actually since the elimination of the community mental health system and most mental health beds. Today in our state there are more mentally ill persons in prisons than there are in hospitals I consider this shameful.
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p>As of July of 2010, there had been eight suicides of prisioners in Massachusetts These were not murderers, but folks who did not receive medical care for mental health issues, or who could not tolerate solitary confinement.
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p>As for “the death penalty”, the court-ordered murder of even one innocent person is unacceptable. A problem with the death penalty is is irrevocability – if you get it wrong, and a person is wrongly executed, which has happened many many times, there is no remedy. Further, the death penalty is ordered far more often for racial minorities. The rates of wrongful convictions that were examined and corrected when a prisoner was already on death row are unacceptably high
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p>The high rate of incarceration and solitary confinement is a result of social disintegration, and lack of attention and focus on preventing recidivism and what works in reclaiming human beings. Judicial execution and solitary confinement are themselves admissions of failure, morally bankrupt, and besides they don’t work to reduce crime or keep society safe.
kirth says
Quick Facts About Wrongful Convictions
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Note that these are only those exonerated by DNA testing; the actual rate of wrongful conviction is very high, even in capital crime cases.
Innocents Convicted: An Empirically Justified Wrongful Conviction Rate
That link is to the abstract. here’s a link to the PDF of the full article.
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p>Killing innocent people does not become acceptable because the State does the killing. Arguing that the killed were Bad People who deserved to die anyway devalues the entire basis for our justice system.
mark-bail says
We’re always looking at other countries when it comes to education, but it seems Western European countries don’t use solitary confinement or the death penalty.
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p>We may have the most violent industrialized society, but they must have some bad guys in other industrialized countries.
christopher says
…and no pesky second amendment to get in the way of sensible policy in this regard.
marc-davidson says
The only justification for holding Bradley Manning, who has not been charged with a crime, is to make sure he doesn’t flee before he’s tried. Anything beyond that is punitive or otherwise unwarranted. It’s difficult to see the benefit of holding him in isolation other than for the perverse reasons that have been suggested, namely to break him into revealing more information about Julian Assange or to send a message to would-be leakers and whistle-blowers that the full force of the US government will descend on them.
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p>Glenn Greenwald describes these conditions:
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and
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p>It is well documented that such conditions are detrimental to the psychological well-being of a prisoner and, as such, constitute torture. The US has, in fact, protested this very thing when others have been held in similar conditions by authoritarian governments.
Consistent with the universal recognition of long-term solitary confinement being cruel and inhuman, the UN has initiated an inquiry into the detention of Manning.
dratman says
You end up with several questions. I hope you get some good answers. This is all very sad.
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p>Now I have a question, just one:
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p>What the hell is wrong with us in this country?
kirth says
Those are the self-appointed adults who work from a ‘pragmatic’ system of values, where what they feel is right, or think will produce an outcome they desire, is the proper course of action, even if it is entirely contrary to the rule of law. As for the rest of ‘us,’ too many of us trust authority in its many aspects: the President, the media, the police and prosecutors.
lightiris says
The comments below are hugely enlightening. I’m not at all surprised JoeTS views torture as acceptable and even deserved. The calculus is simple. Justice is served when his gut feels the crime has been avenged. And there are lots of people around just like him. What escapes these folks is the notion that there are some human values that move humanity, as a whole, forward and are worth upholding under any circumstances. Adherence to these principles ensures that we will make progress as a species and reject, at least in philosophical terms, our more savage and primitive emotional urges that indulge the worst of our natures. Advocating the use of torture indicates someone is expressing the most limbic and primitive desires. The intellect is not engaged; the gut is. Fortunately, we have tried–with varying degrees of success–to evolve into a species that values intellectually reasoned decisions and values that advance the betterment of everyone. JoeTS’s life as an American has been made possible and even enriched by the historic adherence to these principles, but he has no appreciation of their influence. The irony is supreme.
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p>Solitary confinement is torture. Societies that use solitary confinement reveal both a fundamental disregard for basic human rights as well as an inability to respect the inherent nobility of humanity. The United States is on a trajectory that can only lead to failure as what seems to the occasional institutional failure to abide by these notions is now systemic and longstanding. Sad stuff.
christopher says
Thus describing succinctly the key problem of the right.
somervilletom says
JoeTS apparently argues that the intensity of the passion inspired in Joe by certain crimes justifies his belief that their perpetrators “deserve” to be tortured. This explicit coupling of passion to punishment denies the arc of more than three thousand years of western justice, beginning with the Hebrew scriptures.
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p>The biblical dictum of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:24) was among the first recorded examples of a society limiting the harshness of punishment for a crime. It marks the initial rejection of just this connection between passion and punishment that JoeTS asserts. For thousands of years prior to this landmark change, vengeance was unlimited. Those same Hebrew scriptures describe an earlier code of justice that unleashed countless bloody spirals of escalating vengeance, with entire tribes being murdered in response to, for example, an accusation of rape. Even cursory study of the Hebrew Scriptures and Torah illuminates the extent to which the ancient Hebrews strove to separate passion from punishment.
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p>The intense passion inspired in the victim and families of the victim by a crime of violence cannot be assuaged by any vengeance. Judicial restraint acknowledges and allows this passion, validating the very real emotions while protecting society from the damage that results from acting on them.
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p>The point of western justice is to solidify this separation. The purpose of any western judicial system is to separate the punishment for a crime from the passion, grief, and desire for revenge of the victim and victim’s family. The intent is to replace this passion with an often imperfect attempt to instead associate the punishment of a crime with the impact on society of committing that crime.
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p>For hundreds of years, western culture has recognized that the damage done to society by any officially-sanctioned torture far outweighs whatever harm society suffered from the crime.
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p>Officially sanctioned torture poisons, corrupts, and eventually destroys the society that promotes it. A value system that denies this reality is itself fundamentally corrupt.
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p>This is why the argument JoeTS makes is so offensive. It also explains why the current administration’s refusal to prosecute the perpetrators of America’s officially-sanctioned policies of torture is itself fundamentally corrupt, and therefore wrong.
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p>America does not torture.