Positive Liberty

Radley Balko writes,

In February of last year, I told you about Lester Eugene Siler, a Tennessee man who was literally tortured by five sheriff’s deputies in Campbell County, Tennessee who suspected him of selling drugs. The only reason we know Siler was tortured is because his wife had the good sense to start a recording device about halfway through the ordeal.

The audio is now available online (read the transcript here). Drug war outrages lend themselves to overuse of superlatives. But I gotta say, this may be the most horrifying 40 minutes of audio I’ve ever heard.

The police are attempting to get the illiterate man to sign an admission of guilt without telling him what it says. They beat him, over and over, hook electrodes up to testicles and shock him, threaten to kill him, and threaten to go after his family. Early news accounts reported that the torture continued well beyond the end of the recording. After the tape ran out, the same deputies apparently repeatedly submerged the guy’s head in a fish tank and a bath tub, threatening to drown him unless he confessed.

This guy at worst was a small-time drug dealer. He had no history of violence. Right now, we’re having a national debate about torturing terror suspects with designs on killing everyone in this country (longtime readers might remember I’m a bit conflicted on this issue). But an incident like this (and you’re delusional if you think it was isolated), in which a U.S. citizen who had inflicted no direct harm on anyone was nearly beaten to death, has been barely mentioned outside of Tennessee.

Now, I’ve read transcripts of prisoner interrogations abroad — that is, of people who were suspected terrorists — and the treatment they received was far milder than this. Not a picnic, to be sure, and I admit I had some serious moral qualms about how we treated them. But this was completely horrifying. Totally in a different league. It’s the sort of thing I don’t usually like to discuss here, as there’s no issue to debate, not among decent people, anyway.

After repeated beatings, threats to his property and his family, and shocks to the testicles, an officer finally reads Siler the document that he is being forced to sign. I quote from the transcript:

Officer Franklin: …I, Eugene Siler, have been informed of my constitutional right not to have a search made of my premises, vehicle, or anything else I have standing of… I have been advised of my right to refuse such a warrant and I do hereby waive my right and authorize Josh Monday, Officer, Campbell County Sheriff’s department, Jacksboro, Tennessee, to conduct a complete search of my contents of the entire vehicle, residence and other which I have standing over… This written permission is being given to me knowingly and voluntarily to the aforementioned officer of my own free will without any threats, coercion, or any…

Muffled sound.

Officer green: Let’s give him a haircut.

Muffled sound.

Eugene: (crying and moaning)

Officer Franklin: Now.

Eugene: (unintelligible)

Slapping, striking, or hitting sounds.

Eugene: (moaning)

Officer Franklin: That’s good.

No coercion, right? All for a good cause, right?

Remember this: When you say that drugs do terrible damage to America, and that legalization would make things “worse,” — remember, you are saying that it would be worse than this.

When you vote to get tough on drugs — this is what you’re voting for.

When you say that you naturally trust the police, and that drug dealers cannot be believed — this is what you are trusting.

And when you say that this must surely be only a few bad apples — consider how rarely a suspect’s wife gets to plant a tape recorder at the interrogation.

As for me, I think the war on drugs is perhaps the closest we’ve yet come to replicating the Stanford prison experiments:

The study was funded by the US Navy to explain conflict in its and the Marine Corps’ prison systems. Zimbardo and his team intended to test the hypothesis that prison guards and convicts were self-selecting, of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions in that situation.

Participants were recruited via a newspaper ad and offered $15 a day ($76 adjusted for inflation in 2006) to participate in a two-week “prison simulation.” Of the 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected 24 whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white, middle-class young males. All were students.

The group of twenty-four young men was divided in half at random into an equal group of “prisoners” and “guards”…

The experiment very quickly got out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment at the hands of the guards, and by the end many showed severe emotional disturbance.

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on day two. Guards volunteered extra hours and worked together to break up the revolt, without supervision from the research staff. After this point, the guards tried to divide the prisoners and pit them against each other by setting up a “good” cell block and a “bad” cell block, to make the prisoners think that there were “informers” amidst their ranks. The efforts were largely effective, and there were no further large-scale rebellions. According to Zimbardo’s former convict consultants, the tactic was similar to those used successfully in real US prisons.

Prisoner “counts”, which had initially been devised to help prisoners get acquainted with their identity numbers, devolved into hours-long ordeals, in which guards tormented the prisoners and imposed physical punishments including long bouts of forced exercise.

The prison quickly became unsanitary and inhospitable. Bathroom rights became privileges which could be, and frequently were, denied. Some prisoners were made to clean toilets using their bare hands. Mattresses were removed from the “bad” cell, and prisoners were forced to sleep on the concrete floor without clothing. Food was also frequently denied as a means of punishment. Prisoners endured forced nudity and even homosexual acts of humiliation.

But then I think to myself, no, I’m over-intellectualizing this stuff again. Sure, the parallels between the war on drugs and these experiments are interesting, in an academic sense. They both take essentially random people, throw them into roles that produce a cycle of violence, and the cycle continues, all for reasons that are trivial compared to the violence itself. Yet the point — didn’t someone once say? — the point isn’t to interpret the world, but to change it.

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