Prison beatings and brutality

Geof Brown

IT WOULD seem a rather stupid question to raise as to whether the dreadful beatings of prisoners now much in the news, was or was not brutality. But I do raise the question for a couple of reasons which also have implications we cannot ignore. Two high-ranking military men discussed the question with me this week. The first, a Major now retired, made the flat statement that the broken bones and knocked-out teeth inflicted by soldiers on the prisoners, was simply not brutality.

He said the soldiers were only doing what they are trained to do. But surely, I remonstrated, how the soldiers did it as witnessed by Dr. Raymoth Notice and as evidenced by the hospital treatment of fractures for many prisoners, surely that was brutality. Not at all, said the Major. Soldiers, he said, are not trained to ask, "Please come out of your cell." They are trained to give orders to "move". And if the person so ordered does not move immediately, soldiers are trained to use force.

For me, that was the rub. Surely I said, use of force is one thing ­ but use of deadly and life-threatening force against civilians cannot be appropriate. In reply the Major demonstrated for me how breaking of ribs and smashing of teeth are a standard part of the soldiers' arsenal of force. But what struck me most was his declaration that in any such confrontation, the soldier must win. To do less, is to deny his training. The party ordered to move must always lose. That of course, is war mentality.

This was sobering. For I began to understand that what Dr. Notice correctly saw as brutal battering of unarmed prisoners by armed soldiers, was not at all so perceived by the soldiers themselves.

The clear implication of that is that soldiers are not and cannot be prison warders even for a day. The further implication is that the sooner real trained warders are in place, the better. You cannot, metaphorically, make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

The second military officer who spoke with me reinforced that view. Although he was able to concede, unlike the Major, that from a civilian viewpoint the beatings were excessive and brutal, he had only one surprise. That was, given how soldiers are trained, how come there were no deaths!

Both himself and the Major agreed that some prisoners could well have been killed.

That was especially true, they agreed, because pails of stale faeces were, (allegedly) thrown at the soldiers.

So there it is, folks. Brutality it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. Delroy Chuck in Wednesday's Gleaner bemoaned the fact of the silence of far too many of us in the face of the inhumane brutality of the prison beatings. Why are so many of us so silent? Are we so numb to violence that what we behold is not brutality but simply soldiers doing their duty?

Another commentator observes that most of us really believe the prisoners deserve what they got. If this is true, we are well past the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth ideology. For though a number of the prisoners were perhaps murderers and rapists, a good many may never have broken anybody's bones or smashed out anyone's teeth. But even if they had, are we to prove ourselves as much or more depraved than they may be, by condoning excessive inhumanity and, yes, brutality?

I fear that as a society we are losing the capacity for shock and revulsion at what normal humankind would regard as the loss of humanity. I well recall an upstanding citizen finding it funny (humorous) that a gunman shot a protesting victim in the victim's open mouth. Go to the movies and see how gratuitous violence gets uproarious laughter from all too many in the audience. Look around and you will see laughing, those whom you thought would know better.

What we fail to understand is that the age-old adage "Violence begets violence" is not just a time-worn cliché. Listen if you can, to the same young men now getting brutal beatings, declaring that when they get out of prison, somebody is going to pay. The somebody is you or me to be fatally shot not just robbed, wife or daughter or sister to be raped first then killed; innocent bystander to be shot or stabbed for the hell of it.

So we fail to understand the implications of our silence, or worse, our complicity in the face of unnecessary violence. Even when the victim is a prisoner whom, but for the grace of God, we could well be. The soldiers have an excuse; it is their training. Failing to act or speak out, what is our excuse?

Geof Brown is an HRD consultant who lectures part-time the UWI, Mona.

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