The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
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Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
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Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
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I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
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And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.

"Flammable Flag" by Nate Beeler

"Flammable Flag" - Nate Beeler, Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, OH, US

Number of sexual assaults reported on children rises to 85 a day

Although, it is despicable wherever children are sexually abused in the world, but these kinds of stories don't make the headlines in the West. When something like these surfaces in the developing world, people are up in arms that children are not being protected by the law enforcement authorities & government.

Usually, the numbers of sexual assaults on children in those countries is quite small, compared to thousands upon thousands being abused in England or North America.
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/17/police-record-85-sexual-assaults-children-day-nspcc

Police are recording 85 sexual assaults on children each day after an increase of more than a third in reports of abuse & exploitation, new figures have revealed.

A total of 31,238 allegations of sexual offences against children, including rape, assault & grooming offences, were made to forces in England & Wales in 2013/14, research by the NSPCC has found. The figures show an increase of 38% – more than a third – on the previous year.

The majority of the victims were aged between 12 & 16 but more than one in four – 8,282 – were younger than 11, the charity said. Of those, 2,895 are estimated to be aged 5 or under, including 94 babies.

More than three-quarters of the reported abuse cases were against girls (24,457). Britain’s largest force, the Metropolitan police, recorded the highest number of sex crimes against children, with 3,523.

The data, obtained through freedom of information requests, reveals a significant year-on-year increase in the number of sex offences against children. In 2012-13, the same research showed that a total of 22,654 sexual crimes against children were recorded by 41 police forces. All 43 forces in England & Wales responded in the latest study.

The NSPCC said that until now the total had largely remained steady & the 38% rise was the biggest increase in 6 years of requesting the figures. Since 2008/09, the number has increased by almost 50%.

Last year the charity helped 2,400 young victims through its therapeutic recovery programme, but it says there are not enough services to support every child who has experienced abuse.

Jon Brown, senior policy officer for the NSPCC, said: “Our estimate is that there are 50,000 children in the country who need help & support for abuse who are not getting it.

“We need the government to step up & breach this gap. It cannot be right that so many children are going without support. We should be treating this as a public health problem given the damage done into adulthood to individuals who have been abused as children.”
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Police experts say the effect of the case has been to encourage more victims, both those reporting abuse in the past & ongoing abuse, to come forward because they are now more confident they will be believed.

But improved recording methods by police have also been cited as a possible reason for the increase.

Brown said it was not clear whether the increase in reports of abuse was due to an actual rise or increased confidence of victims coming forward.

He agreed with comments made last month by Simon Bailey, chief constable of Norfolk & the national police lead on child abuse, that there was a real increase in abuse taking place, much of it facilitated by the internet.

Responding to the new figures, Bailey said they still represented the tip of the iceberg.

“Many, many, more victims have found the confidence to report abuse, knowing they will be treated with sensitivity & respect, that we will listen to them & that we will take their allegations seriously,” he said.

“Increased reporting means we are dealing with unprecedented number of investigations but it is my belief that more abuse is being perpetrated. The internet has given people the ability to sit in their room & indulge fantasies in a way that simply was not available to them two decades ago.”

Last month Bailey revealed that the police are investigating more than 1,400 prominent men, including politicians, celebrities & those linked to institutions, over allegations that they have sexually abused children in the past. The investigations are being carried out by forces across the country & coordinated by a team running Operation Hydrant.
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Peter Wanless, the charity’s chief executive, said: “These figures are disturbing & clearly illustrate child sexual abuse is a continuing & widespread problem that needs urgent action. But we know this is still only a fraction of the true number of victims because some endure an agonising wait of many years before telling anyone – & others never reveal what has happened to them.”

Criminal justice reform ignores victims of crime

A great opinion piece. It essentially highlights what I blogged about in my previous blog post where corrections officers in prisons are also silently suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

Since, I put most of what I think about this issue, in that blog post, I won't repeat myself, here. But, this opinion piece comes back to the same point that victims of violent crimes also want the same changes in the prison system, as the corrections officers; rehabilitation of prisoners instead of packing them in prisons like sardines. Building more prisons won't solve the crime. Locking a first-time offender with a hardened criminal only increases the chances that that first-time offender is only going to become a hardened criminal him/herself.

So, governments should be using the tax dollars in building more rehab centers for criminals, instead of building more & bigger prisons. Current prison system doesn't help anyone, but actually exploits the prisoner & the whole society.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/21/criminal-justice-reform-ignores-victims-of-that-makes-no-sense

When policymakers think of the people who comprise the victims’ rights movement, young people of color from low-income communities may not be the first group that leaps to mind. But the facts suggest these survivors should be.

My organization conducted 2 years of research & found that 1 in 5 Californians experience crime – but its impact is concentrated & unequal. The majority of crime victims live in lower-income communities & repeat victimization is even more concentrated (echoing research on victimization in the entire US). When it comes to violent crime, those most likely to be repeatedly victimized are young people of color, especially African-American & Latino males.

2 out of 3 crime survivors reported being victimized more than once in the last 5 years. Many repeat victims have long histories of suffering multiple types of crimes, such as sexual exploitation, abuse or community violence. Worse still, only a small number of survivors receive any help, despite often experiencing severe depression, anxiety & post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of crime.

Young people of color from low-income communities bear an unconscionably disproportionate burden of violence & crime – & are victimized at staggering rates while also the least likely to get help to recover from trauma. Most frequently victimized, least often supported. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.

Beyond lacking access to recovery support, most crime victims also disagree with the direction criminal justice policymaking has taken over the last few decades of prison expansion. While the traditional approach to victims’ rights has focused on toughening punishments for people convicted of crime & strengthening the rights of victims during criminal proceedings, our research shows that most survivors of crime think that our current investments in justice system are unwise. 2 out of 3 California victims surveyed believe bloated prisons either make inmates better at committing crimes or have no impact on crime at all. Most survivors want greater investments into rehabilitation, mental health treatment & prevention over bigger prisons & jails.

Listening to crime victims can tell us a lot how we should reform our safety & justice systems. We must embrace survivors as unexpected advocates for justice reform. It’s time to stop pretending that building more prisons protects survivors – it doesn’t.

Procedural rights for victims are critical, & accountability for people who commit crime is an essential component of an effective criminal justice system. Yet, many victims never even get to a courtroom. National statistics reveal that over half of violent crime goes unreported, eliminating any possibility of a prosecution. And even when violent crimes are reported, less than half result in an arrest. So focusing only on criminal proceedings leaves out the experiences & needs of the majority of crime survivors.

Packed prisons & extreme sentencing for the fraction of crimes that result in a conviction also depletes the very resources needed to improve victim protection & community safety. We need to rethink what investments can serve & protect as many victims as possible, including the communities most impacted by crime. We should pay special attention to the needs of those at greatest risk of being repeatedly victimized, such as youth of color.

When victims go without trauma recovery support, they risk being victimized again & falling through the cracks in life: dropping out of school, suffering health problems, self-medicating to the point of addiction & even turning to crime themselves.

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Instead of continuing to create harsh penalties that, in turn, create more prisons as our response to crime, we should invest in mental health care & trauma-informed services for anyone traumatized by violence, as well as safe places to go when crisis erupts, family support programs & economic recovery assistance for victims. We also need to improve the relationship between police, prosecutors & the communities they serve, so that victims trust – & can safely cooperate with – law enforcement to solve more crimes.

Despite the prevalence of pro-victim rhetoric during the prison-building era, few policymakers have asked themselves who experiences crime, who is most vulnerable to repeat crime or what survivors need to recover & avoid future harm. Most crime victims have never been at the center of attention of criminal justice policies, nor have their experiences & needs been considered as penal codes & prison populations mushroomed over the past 3 decades.

But the evidence suggests that when you ask the people most affected, survivors are less interested in spending tax dollars to fill more prisons & instead want to prioritize investments that will actually prevent crime in the first place. It is time for policymakers to finally listen – & put the perspectives of those most vulnerable to harm at the center of policies.

The hidden PTSD crisis in America's jails

A good article highlighting something which us, in the general public, never think about: corrections officers in prisons are also subjected to daily abuse & stress, which leads them to suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

The main problem is the prison system. It's the same system all over the world; if a person is convicted for a crime, then he/she is thrown in a jail cell for a determined amount of time or for life. Now, if the prison system stops at that point, even then, it will not create a huge problem. It becomes a huge problem when the government officials starts listening to prison-industrial complex lobbyists, & in pandering for their constituents' votes, start broadening the definition of crime.

That's when several things start to happen:
1. Any kind of crime, major or minor, is considered huge.
2. Judges & the state prosecutors are rewarded for prosecuting as many people as they can.
3. More convicted criminals can be shown by politicians, to the general public, as the proof that their tough-on-crime stance is working.
4. As more people get convicted, even for minor offences, prisons start to fill up fast.
5. Prison-industrial complex start to get "free" labourers in the form of convicted prisoners, which is another form of slavery.
6. Governments & businesses start to pay the companies involved in the prison-industrial complex in the form of subsidies & for products made from prisoners' labour.
7. So, now, those prisons become like a business unto itself. And, as every business' primary responsibility is to lower its costs & increase its profits, those prisons start to be judged with the same metrics. That's where, the problem starts to snowball into a giant problem with very adverse consequences for the whole society.

As prisons become like businesses, they start to treat all prisoners as the same. So, even a hardened criminal is treated the same as first-time offender. In that case, a first-time offender might have benefited a lot with more of a rehab approach, instead of being locked up with a hardened criminal. But, since, rehabs cost money & prisons don't want to invest in something which cost money, that first-time offender never gets any rehab treatment, to the point, that he/she becomes a hardened criminal him/herself.

So, now, the society has to tolerate a hardened criminal, if he/she is ever released. Since, he/she is a hardened criminal now, he/she will most likely commit the offence again, which will result him/her in receiving a much harsher sentence. That will only help in overcrowding of the prisons.

Furthermore, as prisons are not allowed or discouraged from investing in prisons, prisoners increase (which also is creating overcrowding in American prisons), but the number of prison guards / corrections officers don't increase, accordingly. The ratio of prisoners to corrections officers gets all skewed, with as much as, 50 or more prisoners are handled by one corrections officer. Imagine, if that's how many children are being taught by one teacher. That would be considered unthinkable in North American education system.

Of course, handling so many criminals, many of whom themselves might be suffering from several physical & mental health problems, for which they don't receive any kind of treatment, by one corrections officer, is only going to cause those corrections officers huge stress. Since, stress is the root cause of many other health problems, those officers also become prone to several physical & mental health problems.

Further compounding the problem is the macho culture of prisons, where showing any kind of weakness is considered almost fatal by both prisoners & corrections officers. So, of course, corrections officers suffer in silence with these physical & mental issues. They take out their pent-up frustrations & anger on prisoners, which is wrong & unjustifiable, & cause more rifts in general society, when it sees how police are treating prisoners.

So, the main issue to resolve here is breaking up the prison-industrial complex:
1. Prisons need to be under governments' control, where governments should invest in rehab treatments of prisoners.
2. Government should help in the reintegration of prisoners after they are released from prisons, reducing the chances of them committing a crime again. After all, if they commit a crime again, they will go to prison once again, & the taxpayers will pick the tab anyway. So, why not invest in making those prisoners a tax-paying citizen, instead of tax-consuming prisoner?
3. Politicians should not be pandering for votes on their crime-reducing capabilities. Let objective data on crimes dictate those policies, since all data nowadays keeps saying that crimes are continuously decreasing. Politicians may also not focus on this issue if they are not receiving any money from prison-industrial complex.
4. Reducing the ratio of prisoner to corrections officers by either reducing the prisoner population or increasing the number of corrections officers or both. This may not be required if politicians don't unnecessarily expand the definition of crime & treat every crime the same way. Minor offences are treated by rehab approach & major offences are processed through the prison system.
5. Changing the macho culture may never happen but it is certainly a desirable option. It will be very hard to do since organizational cultures don't change so easily, especially, considering it's the prison system we are talking about.
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/corrections-officers-ptsd-american-prisons

Michael Van Patten’s 18-year-old son came home to find his dad crouching on the kitchen floor, gun in hand, a nearly empty bottle of gin by his side, tears running down his cheeks. Trevor grabbed the weapon, ran up to his room, shut the door & didn’t speak to his dad – or anyone – about the incident for 13 years.

For Michael, this was the build-up of nearly 3 decades working as a corrections officer at the Oregon state penitentiary. “The only way I knew how to deal with it was to eat a bullet.”

There is little awareness of how the culture of endemic violence in prisons affects the correction officers who interact with prisoners. But with over 2 million prisoners & around half a million COs, it is a widespread & underreported problem.

Corrections officers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at more than double the rate of military veterans in the US, according to Caterina Spinaris, the leading professional in corrections-specific clinical research & founder of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, a nonprofit based in Colorado.

This in turn inevitably affects prisoners. While there is no hard data on guard-on-inmate assaults, interviews with current & former corrections officers revealed that COs occasionally take out the stress of the job on inmates.

In 2011, Spinaris did an anonymous survey of corrections officers, testing them for indications of PTSD: repeated flashbacks of traumatic incidents, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, suicidal thoughts & alienation, among others. She found that 34% of corrections officers suffer from PTSD. This compares to 14% of military veterans.

The suicide rate among corrections officers is twice as high as that of both police officers & the general public, according to a New Jersey police taskforce. An earlier national study found that corrections officers’ suicide risk was 39% higher than all other professions combined.

“Right now, we’re about where the military was 10, 15 years ago when it comes to them dealing with PTSD,” Van Patten tells me. Nearly 20 of his fellow officers have committed suicide since he started working in corrections. He nearly became a statistic himself.

Van Patten was assaulted when he was helping a nurse give a rectal exam to an inmate suspected of packing drugs. As he was reaching down to grab the inmate’s ankles to flip him over, the inmate came down on Van Patten’s back, dislocating his skull from his spinal vertebrae. Van Patten couldn’t walk for 5 months, nor could he hold his newborn child.

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Most of his job, around 95% as he estimates, is pretty mundane. Every day he does a cell count, keeps an eye on inmate’s activities, fetches someone toilet paper. This goes on for 8 or, often, 16 hours straight – sometimes without a lunch break, depending on the day.

It’s the other 5% that leads to the extraordinarily high rate of PTSD: dealing with inmate violence, coming home with faeces smeared all over his uniform, trying to stop suicide attempts.

Van Patten said the biggest stress factor is not knowing when crisis situations may arise. This leads to permanent hyper-vigilance, “because we go into a place where we have control, but yet we don’t have control, because the inmates let us run the prison. If they wanted to, they could take it. They’re compliant until they choose not to be,” he said.

As soon as a CO enters a prison, he or she goes into battle mode. “We put on our armour. When you walk through the first gate, it clicks. And so does your back,” says Michael Morgan, an ex-officer at Oregon state penitentiary. “You’re in the pressure cooker” for at least 8 hours – the duration of one shift.

Corrections wisdom dictates that you deal with trauma by not dealing with it at all. “They teach us to leave it at the gate,” said Morgan. “Eight and the gate” is the unofficial motto.

But even off-duty, the guards are always on edge. At an interview over lunch, Jeff Hernandez, another CO at Oregon state penitentiary, requested to swap places at a restaurant so he could sit facing the entrance of the room. This is a common quirk among those working in corrections.

COs say working in prison has significant long-term effects on your personality. Van Patten said the job changed him within 6 months. He became more cynical, withdrawn & aggressive.

“You almost become non-human, robotic, emotionless,” said Charles Ewlad, the warden at Riverhead correctional facility at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island. When he first started, “people came to work hammered every day. That was the deal.” This is no longer the status quo, though substance abuse is still a widespread coping mechanism.

“I went to work every day & I put this persona on,” Van Patten said. He has seen inmates show up at recreational activities with a 9-inch shank sticking out of their eye, others hang themselves, & still others cut their arteries & bleed to death.

“I didn’t know how to release the stuff I kept dreaming about. You’re doing tier count & you’re watching a human being die in front of your eyes because he’s coughing up lungs & screaming with his eyes for help & there’s nothing you can do,” Van Patten said. “Even though he’s an inmate, he’s still human; you’re still human.”

On the first day of work, his son Trevor – who also works as a corrections officer – remembers seeing the remains of a prisoner who was beaten to death by other inmates. “You see people smashing pumpkins on Halloween. Imagine all of the orange being red. And then all the orange on the outside being white. That’s what it looked like on first image. That’s a human being.” An hour after that he was eating lunch, then went back to work.

‘When I was struggling, nobody helped me’

In the years & months leading up to his attempted suicide, Michael suffered from all the typical symptoms of PTSD: insomnia, cold sweats, phantom violence while asleep. He worked out obsessively & self-medicated with alcohol.

He didn’t even know what PTSD was at the time. That’s partly because it’s not something that COs talked about. The culture is tough & macho, and any sign of vulnerability, especially a mental health diagnosis, carries stigma.

“Officers can never be weak. Inmates can never be weak. It’s its own world,” said Brian Baisley, the head of the medical evaluation unit at Riverhead.

...

Jeff Hernandez, the CO at Oregon state penitentiary, recalls one incident where an officer working on the notoriously difficult intensive management unit had a breakdown & burst into tears on the job. “I know from talking to several people there really still is an undercurrent of ‘You never should have done that on the unit’,” he said.

...

PTSD is considered taboo partly because many fear a diagnosis will have negative repercussions on their career prospects.

“They won’t get diagnosed because of the stigma,” Michael Van Patten says. Many are afraid that they will be put through a “fit for duty” test with a state psychologist as a result, & will be decertified.

Some corrections officers at Oregon state penitentiary & Riverhead in Long Island do not think prison is a rehabilitative solution, merely a punitive one. “There’s got to be a better way to do things than put, say, James here in a corridor with 30 inmates for 8 hours,” says Charles Ewlad, warden of Riverhead.

“We’re doing time too, we’re just getting paid for it,” says Brian Dawes, head of the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network. The national average annual wage for a CO is $44,910, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California this can go up to $100,000.

In 2013, Van Patten decided to go public within his department about his attempted suicide, out of concern over the recent slate of staff suicides. “I finally thought that I’d been around there long enough, that someone had to break the ice.”

He recorded a video of himself speaking to his son Trevor about the incident. That was the first time they ever spoke about it together. The film was screened at the annual in-service training.

Jeff Hernandez remembers feeling shocked when he saw the video in that context: “I was not prepared because his personality has never been where I could even consider the possibility of him trying to do something like that.”

But some COs still feel the stigma of having mental health issues. Michael Morgan, the ex-CO, was diagnosed with PTSD. He said that when he reached out to the state’s mental health emergency hotline & the department during his extended breakdown, they were dismissive of him once he said that he wasn’t feeling suicidal.

...

Morgan’s mental health struggles started when he was pulled over in 2010 for driving while drunk. He spent 32 hours on the other side of the bars for the first time while he was waiting to be arraigned. “I pretty much hit rock bottom,” he said. “When I was struggling, nobody helped me.”

A year later, he got a decertification notice based on multiple charges. ...

“There were times when I got off a 12-hour shift that I would go out in my truck & I would turn the radio up as far as it would go for 5 to 10 minutes, just to feel something different that I could say: ‘OK, I can feel this rather than the other sensation’.”

It was during this period that Morgan ended up in the psychiatric ward. He was driving in the car with his wife when he pulled over, put on the emergency brake & told his wife to call the police on him: “I didn’t feel in control & I knew that that’s not a good thing.”

Morgan was diagnosed with PTSD on the psychiatric ward. Although this seal caused him a lot of anxiety, it actually helped him in his appeal to the decertification panel.

Once he submitted his medical paperwork, instead of firing him they transferred him from security to a non-security job under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

He is now the co-facilitator of a mental health training program at Oregon state penitentiary &, along with Michael Van Patten, is making an example of himself to raise awareness of PTSD.

“But,” Van Patten said, “you can’t change a culture over night.”

Mentally ill inmates abused in 5,000 US detention centers

Torture of Gitmo & Abu Ghraib detainees doesn't upset one when one considers that mentally ill prisoners are so inhumanely abused in mainland US. Deaths & tortures of African-Americans become less of a surprise when one compares those incidents with this news. After all, those detainees were not even Americans & belonged to a different religion & ethnicity. After all, those African-Americans were of sound mental health (at least most were).

I'm definitely not saying that torturing POWs (Prisoners of War) is all ok or abusing & killing of African-Americans by American cops is ok from any perspective.

What I am saying that in American culture / society, the top brass (government) is showing with their actions, around the world (foreign policy), that the powerful should & can do anything to the powerless without any fear of reprisals or punishment. Even if the army or police do get caught & sentenced, they are out in the general population within a few short months.

The concept, at least in the corporate world, is becoming common that leadership is a very important factor in the success of a company. Leadership defines the culture & tone of the whole organization.

Well, ironically, American governmental leadership has spread this notion in its own citizens that the powerful should eat the lunch of powerless with impunity. It spread this idea by invading countries at will & unilaterally, & killing anyone it likes, without any fear of reprisals. American leadership takes those reprehensible actions because they think that since their army is the largest & most powerful in the world, they can do anything to the powerless. Well, that same idea has sown itself in the common citizenry, where law enforcement authorities (cops) & law enforcement apparatus (prisons) are abusing the powerless with impunity.

You reap what you sow !!!
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http://www.rt.com/usa/258181-hrw-abuse-prisons-inmates/

Human Rights Watch has issued a report stating that mentally ill prisoners are being abused in detention facilities across the US, & that these practices are happening in over 5,000 facilities.

The activist group says inmates are being subjected to unnecessary & excessive use of force, & the problem is widespread.

The report provides details of cases where inmates were shocked with Tasers, & where pepper spray was used against them.

In some cases, prisoners were left in restraint chairs for days, or put in scalding showers.

“I think the public & legislators for far too long have been willing to send people to prison, without thinking a whole lot about what life behind bars [is like]. And what goes on behind bars is often hidden, people don’t know what is happening,” Jamie Fellner, one of the report’s authors & senior adviser at Human Rights Watch, told RT.

“What we wanted to focus on was <…> the fact that in so many cases when force wasn’t required, when you had non-violent, minor non-threatening misconduct by a prisoner that didn’t need to be responded to with force,” Fellner concluded.

Among the especially troubling cases was Nick Christie, a 62-year-old man who had recently stopped taking his medications for depression & anxiety. He was incarcerated in Florida in 2009 for a nonviolent misdemeanor.

At one point, locked in his cell & crying out for medical help, he kept yelling & banging on the cell door.

Prison officials sprayed him with chemical spray over a dozen times in 36 hours, & immobilized him in a restraint chair with a spit mask covering his face. He died from cardiac arrest.

Another Florida prisoner diagnosed with schizophrenia defecated on the floor of his cell & refused to clean it up.

Officers allegedly put him in a scalding shower, left him there for over an hour, & the inmate subsequently died.

However, the case that specifically caught the attention of human rights activists was 35-year-old Christopher Lopez. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic & was discovered on his cell floor semi-conscious.

Staff failed to call medics & instead put Lopez in a restraint chair. A few hours later, he experienced a severe seizure.

The officers finally released him from the chair, but left him lying handcuffed on the floor. Lopez died a few hours later. His lawyer spoke to RT about the case.

“His mother had contacted me & said he had died in custody, she went to look at the body and saw signs of abuse. That got me interested, I got hold of the autopsy report, & began to investigate it,” attorney David Lane said.

“What appeared to be the cause of death was an overdose of psychotropic medication to the point of electrolyte imbalance, & his heart was slowly stopping,” he added.

The lawyer also told RT that the general attitude towards mentally ill inmates in the US is that they are a “management problem,” & they are dealt with like this, “as opposed to mentally ill human beings.”

Around 20% of prisoners in the US have a serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder & major depression, according to a press release issued by Human Rights Watch. Inmates suffering from such conditions often find it difficult to cope with imprisonment & to comply with instructions.

Have police departments across the US declared war on black people?

A great opinion piece. Simply fantastic. Left me speechless. Some points in it were similar to what I've been saying all along in my blog posts (for example, I've always said that slavery has not ended but immigration in the developed world is a form of slavery when migrants are considered second-class citizens, & regardless of how much US & the developed world lectures the developing world on human rights abuses, the developed world itself has a far worse continuing record in human rights abuses). A must-read piece.

Only thing I will add here is that although, this opinion piece is focused on African-Americans, I will add all minorities in it; be it South Asians or Latinos. Any & all minority, which is "coloured", is very adversely affected by North American racism on a daily basis. If you see there that I mentioned "North American," because racism is as much in US as in Canada. We, Canadians, may think there's no or far less racism in Canada than US, but ask any minority in Canada how they are faring in Canadian society, & they will tell you how racism has affected them.

A great line from the piece: "Rather than the land of the free, the United States of America is the land of cruelty & barbarity, a corporate dictatorship under which the poor & dispossessed are locked out of society, denied healthcare, housing, education, & life chances compatible with a humane system of government & economy."
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http://www.rt.com/op-edge/255829-police-brutality-black-us-rights/

Organizers from the group, Ferguson Action, declared recently that, “The war on Black people in Baltimore is the same war on Black people across America. Decades of poverty, unemployment, under-funded schools & police terrorism have reached a boiling point in Baltimore & cities around the country."
 
The scenes of civil unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray – the latest in an alarming number of young black man to end up dead at the hands of the police or while in police custody – broke with a recent pattern of non-violent protest & attempts to gain justice & redress through the system. Despite 6 of the cops involved in the Freddie Gray case being charged with Gray’s homicide, it remains to be seen whether the unrest in Baltimore is a one-off event or a deepening of a developing crisis that appears to have no end in sight.
 
According to figures compiled by the Free Thought Project – a US justice advocacy group – 136 people had been killed by the police across the country. It’s a figure that makes sober reading when we break it down into 1 victim every 8 hours, or 3 per day. No other industrialized nation compares in this regard, highlighting the extent to which social cohesion in a country that extends itself in lecturing other nations around the world on human rights is near non-existent.
 
That said, those included in the aforementioned number of victims of police violence are not only black people, & it is a fact that more white people have been killed by the police than black, until of course we break that statistic down to factor in the proportion of black victims from the population as a whole.
 
It would be a mistake to put this crisis down to a few rogue & racist cops. It runs much deeper than that, exposing the ugly truth of a society that operates according to the maxim of all against all. In other words, the culture of racism & brutality that pervades increasingly militarized police departments is a symptom of the foundation of injustice upon which the nation & its institutions rest. Rather than the land of the free, the United States of America is the land of cruelty & barbarity, a corporate dictatorship under which the poor & dispossessed are locked out of society, denied healthcare, housing, education, & life chances compatible with a humane system of government & economy.
 
The corollary to this is a male prison population of over 2 million that is disproportionately black, making the US, a country that makes up just 5% of the entire world's population, home to a quarter of the entire world’s prison population. This in itself is a withering indictment of a nation that extends itself in claiming exceptionalism based on its self-appointed status as the land of the free. This view is based on a belief that the majority of crimes are a product of poverty, alienation, & social exclusion. The black American novelist, Ralph Ellison, in his most famous novel – ‘Invisible Man’ – opines that, “Crime is an act of unconscious rebellion.”

In the US in 2015 there is much to rebel about.
 
I saw it for myself during a recent visit to Los Angeles, a city where the sheer number of homeless human beings is simply staggering. Everywhere I went I came across them shuffling up & down the street mumbling to themselves, carrying their earthly belongings in plastic bags or, if they’re lucky, pushing them in a shopping kart.
 
This huge colony of homeless people exists in the entertainment capital of the world, home to Hollywood, where the mythology of the American dream projects the lie that poverty & social exclusion are products of individual failure rather than systemic failure, while material wealth & success is a measure of human worth & moral rectitude. It is of course a lie, one that has succeeded in acting as a smokescreen to conceal the widening & deepening cracks in the nation's foundations.
 
Those suffering under the weight of this system should not expect to receive any succor from Washington anytime soon.
 
On the contrary, here resides a political culture & political class slavishly devoted to the rights, interests, & advancement of corporations & their very rich executives, shareholders, & investors – i.e. the rich. The by-product of this culture has been the normalization of social & economic injustice, which as mentioned is the foundation of a foreign policy of war, military intervention, & the blithe disregard for international law & national sovereignty as & when those aforementioned corporate interests dictate.
 
Some may question the validity of linking US foreign policy to the state of its society at home, but they'd be wrong. Both are inextricably linked, forging a circular relationship of injustice, violence, leading inexorably to atomization & crises. Malcolm X put it best when he said, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo.”

In the US class & race constitute two sides of the same coin. Black people make up around 13% of the population, which translates to just over 30 million people, the majority of whom can trace their roots in the country to slavery, with the argument gaining traction that the plantation still exists for young black males today in the shape of a vast network of Federal & State correctional facilities.
 
No justice, no peace & black lives matter are the clarion calls of a movement that has emerged in response to a wave of violence committed by police departments viewed increasingly as forces of occupation rather than law & order.
 
Who will guard the guardians?

Deadly blooms of Helmand

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-deadly-blooms-of-helmand-the-opium-crop-provides-the-main-income-for-many-afghan-farmers-but-the-police-does-what-it-can-to-destroy-poppies-10222864.html

Ghulam Hassan is in the mood to celebrate Eid ... 3 months early. His 1.5-acre farm in a small village in Helmand province has been blooming with white & crimson flowers. Now the petals are just beginning to drop, giving way to round, sticky, pungent green pods. In a few more days the pods will swell to the size of a bulb. This is when Mr Hassan’s family of 14 will move in. They will carefully slice open the bulbs & collect the oozing white latex or resin – the main ingredient in heroin.

“This is a bumper crop. The yield will be enough to feed my family for more than a year,” Mr Hassan said, gazing gleefully at his poppy field just outside the village of Hajj Alam in the Nehri Saraj district.
 
He is one of thousands of Afghan farmers who, despite the best efforts first of the US-led coalition & now of the country’s own anti-narcotics department, are growing more poppies than ever before.
 
Not only is the income from opium up to $1,800 (£1,200) per acre, some 12 times higher than that from conventional crops, but there is another, more insidious factor at work. Last year, like the year before that, Hassan had sown wheat.

“I borrowed from relatives & friends to buy seeds & fertilisers. The harvest was good,” he said. “But that’s where the good news ended. Because of the Taliban threat, truck drivers were not willing to carry the produce to bigger markets. As a result, most of my wheat rotted in the field. The crop was lost & I was left with a $4,000 debt.”

Dozens of Mr Hassan’s neighbours too have discarded wheat, maize & vegetable crops for opium poppies, which not only gives them easy access to credit & protection from the Taliban, but also fetches more money.
 
There is no sign that the Afghan government, now supposed to be policing the whole country itself since the formal conclusion of the US-led combat operation last year, is bringing the Taliban under control. More than 7 months after President Ashraf Ghani took office, Afghanistan still does not have a Defence Minister, & the security situation is deteriorating nationwide.
 
Meanwhile, the prospect of a higher income at a time of growing insecurity is driving more & more farmers to take up poppy cultivation. Last year, according to official Afghan & UN figures, the total area under opium poppy cultivation in the country rose by 7%, to more than 550,000 acres. Helmand, with almost 300,000 acres, had the dubious distinction of being Afghanistan’s biggest poppy-growing province.
 
Officials in the ministry of counter-narcotics say that Helmand is on course to set a record for poppy-growing this year, with the area under the crop rising a further 16%.
 
It is bad news for Colonel Mohamed Abdali, head of the interior ministry’s counter-narcotics police team in Helmand, whose already difficult job is becoming ever more challenging. Colonel Abdali is responsible for eradicating the province’s poppy fields. For the past 4 months, he & his 80-man team have been gathering information, mapping & photographing the fields. “We have prepared our own database – location of the fields, area under the crop, owners, etc,” Colonel Abdali said. “We send this data to the counter-narcotics ministry & on its clearance, destroy the fields.

“We have only a small, one-and-a-half month window to destroy the crop. It’s best to clear the field when the poppy has blossomed. Eradicating the crop before that allows a farmer to replant & regrow.” As he spoke, he signalled his men to mount 4 US-made Massey Ferguson tractors. Escorted by 15 armed soldiers in 3 police vans, they began to roll towards Trikh Nawar, ... some 20 miles from where Mr Hassan was preparing to harvest his crop.
 
The convoy makes its first stop at Haji Mamoon Khan’s field, & soldiers jump out to take up defensive positions. On Colonel Abdali’s signal, 5 men set off carefully to search for mines or any hidden improvised-explosive devices. “We always follow this drill. We are the enemies of both the Taliban & the drug dealers, said Colonel Abdali. “The villagers are also hostile to us. We have to keep our eyes & ears open for lurking Taliban fighters, roadside bombs & IEDs. We can’t take any chances.”

When a whistle from the field gave an “all-clear” signal, 2 tractors set about ploughing up Mr Khan’s poppies.

“They have ruined me & my family,” said the farmer, contemplating the crop that he had nurtured for months. “The produce would have helped me pay for my wife’s surgery & for my son’s wedding. But it’s all gone now. I can’t bring home happiness.”

His quiet sobs seem to unsettle the young colonel. “I know I am destroying someone’s livelihood. An entire family was depending on this crop,” Colonel Abdali said. “But it would have destroyed so many other families.”

The next day, as the team prepared to enter another poppy farm, Colonel Abdali received a phone call back at his Lashkar Gah HQ. “There’s been a landmine explosion,” the caller said. “One officer is dead, one is wounded.”
 
“Do not touch anything. Come out of the farm. Tread only on the tractor tyre marks,” Colonel Abdali warned.
 
The explosion, in Trikh Nawar, came as Sayed Shah, a counter-narcotics officer, was trying to defuse a mine. His body, covered by a tarpaulin, was lying in an ambulance, & 2 soldiers were bleeding from head wounds. As the ambulance was about to pull away, a phone rang in the dead soldier’s pocket. Colonel Abdali pulled out the phone to answer it. The caller was the soldier’s brother. “Sayed Shah is a martyr now. We are bringing him home,” Colonel Abdali told him.