A thought-provoking piece in Boston Review on the twighlight hours of the 8th Amendment in America:
I recall the words of Marine Brigader General Michael R. Lehner at Guantànamo Bay in 2002: "There is no torture, no whips, no bright lights, no drugging… We are a nation of laws." But what kind of laws? Laws that permit indefinite solitary confinement in state-of-the-art, high-tech units, with cell doors, unit doors, and shower doors operated remotely from a control center. Physical contact is limited to being touched through a security door by a correctional officer while being placed in restraints or having restraints removed. Inmates have described life in the massive, windowless supermax as akin to "living in a tomb," "circling in space," or "being freeze-dried."
When does an emotional scar become visible? To make it visible is to stigmatize, yet only certain kinds of stigmatization are recognized: those that accord with the substandard of what prisoners are assumed to be. They are all bodies. Only some are granted minds. And who is to decide? The unspoken assumption remains: prisoners are not persons. Or, at best, they are a different kind of human: so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies. The naked pyramid of flesh in Abu Ghraib, the kneeling and shackled bodies, blindfolded by blacked-out goggles and hooded in Guantanamo, sanction degradation. Such inhuman treatment, however, is made lawful when our government refuses to recognize that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment has a precise meaning, when our current courts continue to ignore obvious violations of human dignity and worth. In a penal system that has become instrumental in managing the dispossessed, the unfit, and the dishonored, such phrases as "minimal civilized measure of life's necessities" or the "basic necessities of human life" prompt us to reconsider the meaning of "human."
