The State of Pennsylvania convicted Nicholas Yarris of rape and murder in 1981. Yarris was sentenced to die, but in 2003 – thankfully, after an appeals process had kept him off the execution table – DNA evidence was presented in the face of relentless opposition by the state that exonerated Yarris. Yarris was then released from Greene State Correctional Institution’s death row.
His story was a local scandal, but it quickly faded. What brought Yarris back into the limelight was his recollection of a prison guard at Greene State, named Charles Graner, Jr. If that name rings a bell, it is not ringing from Pennsylvania, but from Iraq.
Graner is one of the tiny handful of prison guards who have been indicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, where as Specialist Graner – US Army Reserve – he was photographed grinning over the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees, most of whom were rounded up randomly on US military sweeps.
“I was just sickened by it because I know what he used to do. And I can only imagine without the restraint of any supervision over there, what he was doing,” Yarris told an interviewer in May. (Cable Network News, story at
http://www.november.org/stayinfo/bre...buGharaib.html )
Yarris, who knew Graner for five years, said that there was nothing surprising about either Graner’s behavior or that of the other guards… at least not to anyone familiar with prison life in the United States.
“Charles was just filled with the glee of opportunity to go over there. Because he said as we were walking down the corridor, ‘I can’t wait to go kill some sand niggers,’” reported Yarris.
Yarris recalled how Graner would smile just as he had in the imfamous photos when guards spit in prisoners’ trays, how he would gratuitously humiliate prisoners during strip searches, and how he used to provoke prisoners into a rage for his own entertainment. As a matter of public record, Graner was accused of beating prisoners at Greene State and even of concealing razor blades in their food, though – as is almost always the case in all US prisons – he was exonerated of all charges.
While many will be quick to (rightly) indict Graner for his sexual sadism, it is also important to understand the institutional and systemic dynamics of prison to begin talking about what prisons are and where we are headed in terms of social control in the future.
I cannot help but refer back to the Stanford Prison Experiment here, but while this explains the subjective experience of prison, for both prisoners and guards, it sheds little light on the structural reasons for the cancerous growth of prisons in the US, for the expanded use of mass detentions as part of US military doctrine post-9/11, or the historical tendencies behind the latter-day expansion of prisons in conjunction with the massive militarization of US domestic police forces.
We have all heard about the alleged propensity of the Chinese to use incarceration as a means of social control.
But studies show that China has 1.51 million inmates with a gross population of 1.3 billion. The United States now has 2.03 million behind bars, which translates into 701 people out of every 100,000 in the US, while China is locking folks up at a measly rate of 117 per 100,000. The second highest rate is in Russia, at 606 per 100,000, and that is in the wake of a history of draconian barracks-socialism, followed by gangster-capitalism. George W. Bush keeps telling everyone that “terrorists” hate us because they “hate freedom.” If that were the case, using prison figures, these same freedom haters should be casting confetti over us.
We have not only 2.03 million locked up, but an additional 5 million under the supervision of the criminal justice system, that is, on probation or parole.
We should be asking the question why. Statistics don’t show crime rates rising, and in fact our crime rates are in some cases lower than countries with far lower rates of incarceration. The answers are hidden inside the general numbers and in history.
It is important to point out that all credible research indicates that the experience of prison renders an inmate more likely, not less likely, to commit more and more serious crimes. So we are not incarcerating to rehabilitate or to protect the public. The ex-convict is far more dangerous than the first offender who does not serve time. Research also indicates that it would cost less to educate than incarcerate young people, so there is no cost-benefit to society. If we are to understand the social rationale for prison, we first have to discard these intuitive answers and hypothesize other ones in their stead. Most social scientists who are outside the gravitational pull of officialdom posit three things: profit, population control, and surveillance.
These are also the motives that lie behind the systemic integration of domestic police doctrine and the developing doctrine of the US military overseas.
I need to point out before going any further that “motives” are not synonymous with some vast, totalizing conspiracy, but that they develop in response to contingencies. This is a point that – when confused – gets lost in a false dichotomy of conspiracy/system.
History is not engineered. It is a process – as Ian Malcom would tell us – that is in some sense deterministic even as it is paradoxically unpredictable. But it is being determined by long term secular trends that are both inertial and beyond the control of any individual, or institution for that matter.