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<h1 id="reader-title">Trump Wants to Bring Back Torture. For
Thousands of Americans, It Never Went Away.</h1>
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<p>February 10, 2017<br>
</p>
<p>Among the many calamities ushered in by the Trump era
is a renewal of the national debate over the legitimacy
of physical torture. The President, unsurprisingly, has
long been in favor of it, <a
href="http://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/trump-on-torture-again/"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">asserting repeatedly</a>
that “torture works,” and <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/06/donald-trump-waterboarding-republican-debate-torture"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">promising</a> to bring back
practices “a hell of a lot worse” than waterboarding.</p>
<p>A <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/01/25/draft-executive-order-on-secret-cia-prisons-signals-a-return-to-the-darkness-of-the-post-911-period/"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">draft of an executive order</a>
leaked during Trump’s first week in office calls for a
revival of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and of
the network of overseas Black Sites that sprung up after
9/11. (For now, Trump says, he will defer to his Defense
Secretary and CIA Director, who believe that other
methods of extracting information are more
effective—though that could change at any time.)</p>
<p>A stinging <a
href="http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/1/statement-by-sasc-chairman-john-mccain-on-reports-of-executive-order-directing-review-of-interrogation-policies"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">response</a> to Trump’s
order came from John McCain, one of the only Republicans
in Congress willing to disagree with the President on
any front. “The President can sign whatever executive
orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not
bringing back torture in the United States of America.”</p>
<p>But as McCain, of all people, should know, torture has
been taking place all along, right on American soil.</p>
<p>During his nearly six years as a POW in North Vietnam,
McCain <a
href="http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-donald-trump-prisoner-of-war-2014-12"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">endured terrible beatings</a>
and other forms of physical torture. Yet he described
his two years in solitary confinement this way: “It’s an
awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and
weakens your resistance more effectively than any other
form of mistreatment.”</p>
<p>For some of the roughly 100,000 people held in solitary
confinement in U.S. prisons and jails, the extreme
isolation and sensory deprivation of solitary are being
used, as they were on McCain, as a means of coercion,
whether it be to reveal information or simply to plead
guilty while awaiting trial.</p>
<p>For tens of thousands of others, this spirit-crushing
treatment is imposed simply as a prison “management
tool.” People in prison are routinely condemned to
spending 23 hours a day alone in small, bare cells, for
months, years, or even decades– not by a judge or jury,
but by prison staff, including rank-and-file corrections
officers. Infractions as trivial as talking back to a
guard, failing to return a food tray, or having too many
postage stamps are reason enough to land you in
prolonged isolation. People with psychiatric
disabilities are disproportionately sent to solitary for
acting out due to untreated symptoms of mental illness,
including self-mutilation and attempted suicide. So,
too, are children, LGBTQ individuals, and people who are
deaf or blind, often purportedly for their own
“protection.” Arguments that solitary reduces violence,
even for those who commit more serious infractions, have
been proven false.</p>
<p>The case against solitary confinement as inhumane,
ineffective, dangerous is proving incontrovertible. But
is it torture? And should it demand the attention of
Americans, even amidst the travesties of justice that
now emerge from the White House on a daily basis?</p>
<p>In his seminal <em><a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">New Yorker article</a></em>
on solitary confinement, Dr. Atul Gawande explored the
experience of former hostages and POWs as well as
individuals formerly incarcerated in U.S. prisons.
“None,” he wrote, “saw solitary confinement as anything
less than torture.” Neither have any of the thousands of
people we have spoken and corresponded with over more
than seven years of covering the subject for <a
href="http://solitarywatch.com/">Solitary Watch</a>.</p>
<p>Even the former warden at ADX, the federal government’s
all-solitary supermax prison in Colorado, <a
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/supermax-a-clean-version-of-hell/"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">called the place</a> he once
managed “a clean version of Hell.” A lawsuit filed in
2012 on behalf of men held at ADX <a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/an-american-gulag-descending-into-madness-at-supermax/258323/"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">describes their responses</a>
to years of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Prisoners interminably wail, scream and bang on the
walls of their cells. Some mutilate their bodies with
razors, shards of glass, writing utensils and whatever
other objects they can obtain. Some swallow razor
blades, nail clippers, parts of radios and
televisions, broken glass and other dangerous objects.
Others carry on delusional conversations with voices
they hear in their heads, oblivious to the reality and
the danger that such behavior might pose to themselves
and anyone who interacts with them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hundreds of people in prison have gone so far as to
choose death over a continued life in solitary
confinement. While approximately 5 percent of the
nation’s prison population is being held in solitary, 50
percent of all prison suicides take place there. The
challenge of taking one’s own life in a bare cell has
been met by individuals who jump head first off of their
bunks, or bite through the veins in their arms.</p>
<p>International human rights bodies have likewise
concluded that solitary confinement constitutes torture.
In 2011, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E.
Méndez <a
href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40097"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">called on countries</a> to
prohibit the use of prison isolation beyond 15 days,
citing the “severe mental pain or suffering” caused by
solitary, as well as the permanent nature of the
psychological and neurological damage it can cause. For
children and people with mental illness, he recommended
a total ban.</p>
<p>In 2015, Méndez’s recommendations were codified in the
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment
of Prisoners, known as the “<a
href="http://www.solitaryconfinement.org/mandela-rules"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">Mandela Rules</a>,” to which
the United States is a party. Yet the U.S. government <a
href="http://solitarywatch.com/2015/07/24/un-human-rights-experts-again-push-for-access-to-u-s-prisons-call-for-solitary-confinement-reform/">repeatedly
denied</a> Méndez the opportunity to even conduct
fact-finding visits to American supermax prisons and
solitary confinement units.</p>
<p>Despite this growing consensus, U.S. courts have, with
a few exceptions, failed to conclude that solitary
confinement violates the Constitutional ban on cruel and
unusual punishment. There are no federal laws—and only a
handful of state laws—that place any limitations on the
use of solitary. Solitary confinement continued to be
used at Guantánamo after the Obama Administration banned
other forms of torture, and even the Army Field Manual,
which has been held up as a model by McCain and others
as a guide for humane interrogation techniques, <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/25/obama-administration-military-torture-army-field-manual"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">permits</a> the use of
solitary.</p>
<p>In the last several years, however, an expanding group
of advocates, joined by growing numbers of ordinary
Americans, have risen up to resist the widespread use of
solitary in U.S. prisons and jails. And under the
pressure of both activism and irrefutable evidence, some
state and local prison systems have begun to <a
href="http://solitarywatch.com/resources/timelines/milestones/">reduce
their dependence</a> on the practice. In January 2016,
they were joined by President Obama, who <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/barack-obama-why-we-must-rethink-solitary-confinement/2016/01/25/29a361f2-c384-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">ordered incremental reforms</a>
to the use of solitary in federal prisons.</p>
<p>The federal-level changes can easily be reversed by
Trump and his new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. But
there is nothing to stop state prisons and local
jails—where the vast majority of the 2.2 million
incarcerated Americans are held—from continuing and
expanding their reforms.</p>
<p>They still, however, have a long, long way to go: <a
href="https://www.law.yale.edu/system/files/area/center/liman/document/aimingtoreducetic.pdf"
rel="external nofollow" title="" class="ext-link"
data-wpel-target="_blank">A recent report</a> suggests
that the number of people in solitary in prisons (not
counting jails) has declined from a high of 81,000 in
2005 to about 70,000 today. These numbers will fall
significantly only if advocates and citizens
maintain—and increase—the pressure for change.</p>
<p>People in solitary confinement may be the most
marginalized members of American society, but they
are human beings–and as Atul Gawande wrote, “all human
beings experience isolation as torture.” Even as the
Trump era delivers its daily doses of disaster, this is
something we cannot afford to forget.</p>
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