Introduction: deaths in custody and detention.

• Author: Scraton, Phil

IT IS THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 30, 2006, AND NEWS HAS JUST ARRIVED THAT IN Baghdad Saddam Hussein has been hanged. His execution is a death in custody authorized and carried out by a state as a demonstration of its monopoly on the legitimate use of lethal force within its jurisdiction. In such circumstances, including several U.S. states, capital punishment on behalf of "the people" supersedes a fundamental principle of human rights conventions: the right to life. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the U.S. administration and its allies, most ardently the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Australia, have reconstructed the concept of a "just war," redefined the context of "preeminence," and established criteria for imposing regime change on "rogue states" regardless of their sovereignty. Though debates persist over the legality or otherwise of the military offensives against Afghanistan and Iraq and new targets are lined up within what U.S. President George W. Bush has promoted as the "axis of evil," the self-styled "war on terror" potentially has no limits: a war without a named enemy, without boundaries, without legitimacy, without rules of engagement, and without prisoner protection.

As U.S. air strikes reduced Afghanistan's towns and villages to rubble, 900 prisoners were taken near Kunduz and held captive in containers. They died in the fierce heat, without water or air, unprotected by the Geneva Conventions. A U.K. Foreign Affairs Minister regretted that "nasty things happen in war." The U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, stated that those taken on the battlefield would not be treated as prisoners of war or "soldiers in action," but as unlawful combatants, later reclassified "enemy combatants. "The "war on terror," he claimed, was not a conventional war because in the military conflict the only legitimate, uniformed soldiers belonged to the U.S. and its allies. Those captured did not wear the uniform of any recognized army and were "indistinguishable from the general population." Arguing that they were "committed terrorists," military detention became the sole criterion of guilt.

Denied prisoner-of-war status, those trawled and selected by the military or security services were interrogated, tortured, and transported without the protection of international law or the Geneva Conventions. Incarcerated outside U.S. sovereign territory, they had no rights under the U.S. Constitution and no access to a jury trial. The process was not a spontaneous response; it had been preplanned. On November 13, 2001, the U.S. had issued a Military Order, Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. It introduced a new form of stateless detention: indefinite internment without trial, and prosecution without independent legal representation. Three months later, Bush used his presidential authority to establish that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

The sight of prisoners decanted from U.S. transport planes, some drugged, all clothed in orange boiler-suits, gagged, chained, and ski-masked demonstrated not only the awesome powers of the U.S. military-industrial complex to capture, detain, and torture, but also its disdain for international conventions and standards. In the early days of Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, children and old men among the 600-plus captives shuffled around cages open to the elements, yet closed to scrutiny. The irony of the Guantanamo mission--"Honor Bound, to Defend Freedom"--was not lost on those who had endured the tribulations and brutalities of interrogation at the hands of the U.S. military. As the allied military invasion of Iraq received war's baton from the devastation of Afghanistan, the Guantanamo detainees became yesterday's story, only to be revisited in the wake of the revelations of Abu Ghraib. From inside the walls of Abu Ghraib came photographic evidence of what many had suspected all along. The self-proclaimed "world's number one democracy" was rendering prisoners to torturing states, engaging directly in torturing interrogations, and in inhuman and degrading treatment of civilian prisoners, as well as allowing routine humiliation as part of informal, discretionary practices.

It is not possible to provide estimates for the number of deaths in custody, by suicide, through torture, or through acts of brutality or neglect as a direct consequence of the military offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq. They would include the summary executions of those taken prisoner, those killed in holding centers and jails throughout the world, and those "rendered" by the U.S. to torturing states for interrogation. Often ignored in the debate over the revealed "excesses" of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Bagram, and other jails, however, is the stark reality that such practices were not aberrations, but extensions of custom and practice institutionalized within prisons in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. As such, they constitute an integral element in the growth of imprisonment, its maximizing of security over all other considerations, its use of technology and isolation against those prisoners considered a threat, and its interlocking processes of demonization and dehumanization.

Prison expansionism in the U.S. and the U.K. did not happen by chance. Elliott Currie (1998: 185-6) notes that in the late 1960s, successive U.S. commissions into crime and urban disorders "called for a balanced approach to crime," recognizing that "a strong and efficient criminal justice system" must be matched by broader social reform in the form of improved equity and social justice. Their message was that, "we could never imprison our way out of America's violent crime problem." To defeat violent crime and urban unrest would mean "attacking social exclusion." The alternative direction at "the crossroads" was to neglect social disadvantage, the material reality of poverty and marginalization, and hit offenders hard with harsher laws, zero-tolerance policing, and uncompromising prison regimes. Successive U.S. administrations went down this road, leading to "bursting prisons, devastated cities, and a violent crime rate still unmatched in the developed world."

Reflecting on the explosion in U.S. incarceration during the 1980s, Nils Christie (1994: 99-100) maps the harsh treatment of prisoners, the "new techniques" and instruments of containment, and the consolidation of supermax security prisons. In supermax prisons, chains, manacles, isolation, natural light deprivation, "non-lethal" weapons, and ritual humiliation provided the mechanics and instruments of modern confinement in the supposed "free world." Reading Corrections Today, the official publication of the American Correctional Association, Christie was "close to not trusting my own eyes." Images of prisoners "who would love to stab, slash, pound, punch and burn" their captors were "unbelievable." Yet the Association, its interests fully integrated into those of large multinationals as providers of the fabric and means of imprisonment, was "the organization with the mandate to administer the ultimate power of society ... an organization for the delivery of pain ... sponsored by those who make the tools."

Christian Parenti's detailed expose of the institutionalized violence endemic in California's maximum-security prisons demonstrated chillingly that it constituted "an extreme expression of the nation-wide campaign to degrade and abuse convicts." To prove their hard-line credentials, politicians perfected a "rhetoric" demonstrating to the electorate that "going to prison is no longer punishment enough." In this volatile context of public clamor and political opportunism arose "a wave of political fads: from chain gangs and striped uniforms, to the stunning evisceration of prisoners' legal rights" (Parenti, 1999: 174). It amounted to "bureaucratic abuse," resulting in terrifying outcomes of deprivation, rape, torture, and even death. Parenti's research reveals the spectacular expansion of the prison-industrial complex over four decades. It functions "to terrorize the poor, warehouse social dynamite and social wreckage." The pathologizing of the poor and the marginalized, supported by academic constructions of the "underclass," justified and legitimated "state repression and the militarization of public space" (Ibid.: 169).

Initially, in numbers imprisoned and in the sheer viciousness of regimes, the U.K. did not experience the excesses of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. More recently, however, the social and political climate within the U.K. produced and sustained a popular commitment to long sentences, harsh conditions, and reduced prisoner rights. During the 1990s, the...