The origins of American willingness to torture
In comments on this post on Crooked Timber, the commenter know as Doctor Slack made the following telling point:
All of this does indicate one of the big blind spots through which the pro-torture lobby has slipped: many Americans are so resigned to the abusive and pathological nature of their vast prison system that it simply doesn?t occur to them that things taking place within it could in fact be cruel and inhuman punishment (torture). So it?s worth wondering if a culture of permissiveness toward torture on domestic soil has greased the skids for much more serious manifestations of it in the so-called ?war on terror.? I think it probably has.
Someone, somewhere, has probably already done a study on this, but it would be interesting to see a good treatment of the mirroring of America?s declining civic culture in on-screen entertainment. It?s been common for some time for screen detectives to threaten criminals with the inevitability of prison rape, just as it?s common now for some of the same on-screen gumshoes to gleefully trot out the PATRIOT Act and threaten the bad guys with the kind of reprisals that used to be associated with foreign police states. And as Jim Henley has pointed out, torture may be on a similar trajectory. It makes you wonder if we?ll be watching the cops on NYPD Blue?s descendants beating, electrocuting and waterboarding people? and be expected to empathize with them.