In Michael Foucault's book Discipline and Punish, Foucault states that Torture has disappeared from public viewing over the past few hundred years. "Among many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle"(Foucault, 7). As United States Citizen's, we have the eighth amendment to protect us against cruel and unusual punishments. Present day society has moved far away from the days of torture. Torture is such a far fetched idea to humans that we will pay money to walk around a torture museum.
How has this extreme shift in penal procedure occured in such a short time? What major events come to mind that would spark such a shift? What about the ideas of torture is so extreme compared to our present system?
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Torture in the Public Spectacle
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'm sure there's a number of incidences I could touch on, but the Reign of Terror (15 months after the F.R.) comes to mind.
I think the founders, Madison in particular, saw factionalism, especially if the majority is included in it, as a very dangerous force in society. Considering 40,000 people died as a result of the Terror, and many were lost in a similiar fashion in G.B. as a result of religious persecution, it seems the 8th Amendment may have been absolutely necessary in the eyes of the founders.
It is interesting to note that although torture has left the scene in terms of domestic judicial processes and enactments of public justice, its practice has markedly resurfaced for interrogations since 9/11. The Bybee memo of August 2002 effectively redefined the concept of torture in the eyes of the administration to an extent that allowed for practices until now deemed unconstitional, all under the apparent guise of obtaining information vital to national security.
Such practices as waterboarding which surfaced in the media for a time have become commonplace in the many holding cells across the globe for extraordinary rendition operations by the CIA, if reports are correct.
So the possibility of being tortured for the sake of obtaining information to protect the homeland has become very real, even for US citizens who come under enough suspicion to be transported to one of these facilities--notably always outside of the continental US, as far as public knowledge shows. Of course in this context, the 'soul' Foucault speaks of that the judicial system is trying to cure does not apply. Once one has been placed into the position of interrogation one has seemingly lost one's rights entirely and become an 'other'--no longer a concern for the domestic judicial system but instead a dehumanized shell containing data in need of extraction. How might Foucault deal with this problem within his framework? The torture, though it may be redefined as something else for the administration, remains torture to anyone who understands the nature of the interrogation techniques being used. Perhaps the recent surge in executive branch powers has created another sort of king figure, and these tortured souls over at the fringes of US territories are the inverted shadows finding a place outside the constraints of a constitutional democracy?
In regards to the original post i agree that torture is no longer part of the public spectacle in a literal way, but all one needs to do is watch the news to see that we are still being presented with images of it. As the other poster said, the news surrounding waterboarding gives us a glimpse back into how torture is still used as a viable means of interrogation. Our prisons are supposed to be focused on retribution but rehabilitation as well, something that torture does not lend itself to well, which might explain some of the shift in why torture seems extreme today. Torturing someone seeks to extract the appropriate amount of pain for the crime, and then release the offender, deciding that they have learned that with crime comes pain; enough of a punishment to stop recidivism. In our culture today we also have a duty to attend to the psychological side of crime, a tactic that torture does not seem to attend to in a effective or even remotely humane way.
Post a Comment