We seem enured to the brutality that many prisoners are subjected to behind bars. We should not be. Cases like this one should be an affront to our sense of decency and should jar us out of our complacency:

Late on the night of August 4, 2010, a badly beaten young man arrived at the trauma ward of Jackson Hospital here. Although the patient was hardly a flight risk, security was tight and prison guards crowded into the emergency room as doctors began treatment.

The patient’s limp body spoke to the savagery of an assault that had left deep contusions on his legs and torso, and inflamed knots bulging from his head and face. He was unresponsive, with fixed and dilated pupils, and doctors quickly diagnosed a traumatic brain injury. Only a ventilator kept him alive. He never regained consciousness and died the next day.

His name was Rocrast Mack. An Alabama prison inmate, his death at age 24 came at the hands of six corrections officers, who took turns battering him with their fists, feet and batons in retribution for a minor altercation with a female guard earlier that night, according to witness accounts and prison records.

The Federal government, it was announced, is now investigating the Alabama Prison System for claims of abuse and brutality. If you think that cases like Mr. Mack‘s are isolated incidents, think again. For several weeks now, I have been planning to write about the brutality that many prisoners and inmates experience at the hands of guards. In September, the ACLU of Southern California issued a devastating report titled “Cruel and Unusual Punishment: How a Savage Gang of Deputies Controls LA County Jails.” The report suggested that:

“To be an inmate in the Los Angeles County jails is to fear deputy attacks. In the past year, deputies have assaulted scores of non-resisting inmates, according to reports from jail chaplains, civilians, and inmates. Deputies have attacked inmates for complaining about property missing from their cells.

They have beaten inmates for asking for medical treatment, for the nature of their alleged offenses, and for the color of their skin.

They have beaten inmates in wheelchairs. They have beaten an inmate, paraded him naked down a jail module, and placed him in a cell to be sexually assaulted.

Many attacks are unprovoked. Nearly all go unpunished: these acts of violence are covered up by a department that refuses to acknowledge the pervasiveness of deputy violence in the jail system.”

I am not naive but I was honestly stunned at the brazenness of the systematic violence and abuse that inmates in LA County were subjected to by staff. The following video features a former inmate detailing the abuse and brutality that he suffered.

The former inmate made the following statement in the video: “This is just a concrete concentration camp.” The concept of prison as a “concentration camp” is actually not new. In the 1960s and 70s, many prisoners made similar claims.

Were the guards who took part in these acts of brutality in Alabama or in L.A. sadists before they started working in jails and prisons? This is doubtful. Instead a more plausible explanation of such violence could be that working in these environments has a profoundly negative and perhaps even dehumanizing impact on people.

I think that the examples of brutality cited above push us to consider the impact that being a jailer has on the people who fulfill this role. During the recent campaign to save Troy Davis’s life, a group of former Wardens wrote a letter asking for a stay of execution. This should not have been remarkable but it was. A couple of sections of the letter particularly stood out to me:

“We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight. We know the legal process has exhausted itself in the case of Troy Anthony Davis, and yet, doubt about his guilt remains. This very fact will have an irreversible and damaging impact on your staff. Many people of significant standing share these concerns, including, notably, William Sessions, Director of the FBI under President Ronald Reagan.

Living with the nightmares is something that we know from experience. No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt. Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative?”

The Wardens were in part making the case that killing a potentially innocent man would have lasting effects on the executioners themselves. One of the Wardens, a man named Allen Ault, spoke eloquently about these concerns on several television programs in the run up to Troy’s ultimate state-sanctioned murder:

In his book New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing, Ted Conover describes his year-long experience as a prison guard. It is a complex portrayal of the role of correctional officers in a prison. We read as Conover, a journalist, is indoctrinated into the ways of prison life. He paints a picture of prisoners who are sometimes scary, unlikeable and dangerous but always human. At one point in the book, he muses about beating up prisoners and setting their cellhouse on fire. He describes the frustrations and sometimes the brutality of his fellow guards who have come to see their charges as something less than human over time. What I found most important in the book though was his reporting about the toll that being a jailer took on the lives of the guards. They had high rates of divorce, health issues, anger, and depression. I think that the book is an essential read for anyone who is interested in how the PIC impacts more than just those who are held captive. It also leaves an indelible mark on the jailers and their families too.

In her brilliant song “Mr. Jailer,” Asa seeks to underscore the interdependence of and the human connection between the jailer and the jailed:

Am in chains you’re in chains too I wear uniforms
You wear uniforms too Am a prisoner
You’re a prisoner too Mr Jailer

I have fears you have fear too I will die
You self go die too Life is beautiful don’t you think so too Mr Jailer

Am talking to you jailer
Stop calling me a prisoner
Let he who is without sin
Be the first to cast the stone Mr Jailer

You suppress all my strategy
You oppress every part of me
What you don’t know
You’re a victim too Mr Jailer

The same theme about the interconnectedness of the jailer and jailed and the sense that their destinies are inextricably linked is struck by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in his exquisite poem “The Prison Cell.” I have taught this poem to youth and it always gets them talking about how we can all be “imprisoned” even without setting foot in a cell. Always, those of us on the “outside” are intimately connected to those we lock in cages. Not to understand this is to live in denial or to live in South Korea which is apparently experimenting with robot prison guards.