“Capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments,” Benjamin Rush wrote in 1792. Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, and a prison reformer, and he’s one of the minor heroes of Anne-Marie Cusac’s Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. Cusac, an assistant professor of communication at Roosevelt University, singles him out as representative of a stream of reformist thought common among the Founding Fathers and their peers. For Rush, opposition to cruel punishment was based on both Christian faith and patriotism. He saw American republicanism as uniquely free, uniquely Christian, and therefore uniquely humane.
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Cusac’s book suggests a couple of answers. In the first place, she notes, the reform movement didn’t necessarily lead to humanitarian improvements. On the contrary, the effort to promote humane rehabilitation often resulted in the replacement of one form of torture with another. One of the most popular “reform” punishments, for example, was solitary confinement. In lieu of branding or whipping, the state would enforce isolation and silence, so that wrongdoers would have time and space to pray and contemplate their sins.
But solitary confinement in practice doesn’t rehabilitate prisoners: it drives them insane. Cusac doesn’t connect the dots explicitly, but it’s fairly clear that the cruel use of isolation in supermax prisons today can be seen not as a refutation of the reformist vision but as an ironic fulfillment of it.
Cusac’s argument that Abu Ghraib was merely an extension of the U.S. prison system is depressingly persuasive. She points out that several of the people involved in the torture were former corrections personnel who’d also been implicated in incidents of prison abuse. At the same time, though, Abu Ghraib suggests the limitations of her bottom-up perspective. The abuses there occurred in a climate in which the Bush administration was actively advocating torture techniques. If Al Gore had won a handful more votes, or Dick Cheney had suffered a debilitating heart attack before becoming vice president, it seems likely that Abu Ghraib wouldn’t have happened. (Not that the solution to prison abuse is necessarily more liberals in power—Cusac argues that Democratic antidrug crusaders like Jesse Jackson are plenty culpable for our current mess.)
Anne-Marie Cusac (yale university press)
