The shameful society

There has to be some connection between torture and prison rape. They show a society that cannot look its enemies, foreign or domestic, in the eye. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Addington should be held to account for authorizing torture, but the problem of torture goes beyond them. It extends to domestic prisons in which rape is treated as unpreventable, not even worth preventing, as de facto just.

Large segments of America believe that however badly our own citizens are treated in prison, foreign terrorists should be treated worse. Hence the outcry over moving Guantanamo detainees to the homeland. The sentiment is based not on any half-way rational assessment of the security risks, but rather on a sense that those men deserve something beyond our native prisons. But when our own prison system cannot even allow prisoners the dignity of going unraped, how much worse must we treat ‘enemy combatants’?