A presentation at the Vera Institute Of Justice, June 22, 2004

Since first reading the reports of the prisoner abuse by soldiers assigned to the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq, and learning further that at least one of the implicated officers was a correction officer who had worked for me in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, I have struggled to find a language with which to express my own sense of outrage at the occurrence and to put the events in some perspective relative to my years spent working in prisons and jails.  All of us were horrified when we saw the pictures of the ugly goings on in that out-of-control military facility.  None of us were more troubled by it than those who have worked our entire professional lives trying to reduce the harm caused by the experience of imprisonment and engaged in a mission to reclaim the lost lives confined within prison walls. 

We are admittedly feeling defensive.  Our good names are in play.  We are embarrassed. Newspapers are calling us, friends ask if this goes on in the prisons and jails we run.  We take refuge behind all we have done in the last 30 years, accreditation, professionalization--but we are forced to confront our failures and worry about all we haven't accomplished.

On May 17, the New York Times in an editorial wrote, " The sickening pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30 years ..." What implications then can we draw from what we have learned of the events of Abu Ghraib?  First of all, we know the story that has emerged is far more complex than the early reports.  Secondly, the more we know the more we discern distinctions that prevent any generalization of those events for American corrections.  This was a unique situation in a unique locale in conditions far different from those that exist in most American prisons and jails. 

Is it inevitable to conclude that what happened at Abu Ghraib is representative of American prison operations?  What relationship does the growth in the nation's prison population have to the way those prisons are run?  What conclusions, if any can we draw from what happened there and whether it represents an extension of the way we run our prisons?  And why should we care?

 To answer the last first, over two million citizens (one of every 140 Americans) are in prison or jail in the United States.  One of eight black men ages 25-29 was in prison or jail in 2002 and one in 27 Hispanic males in the same age group.  Black men have a 32% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, greater than the chance they will go to college.  In 2001 local, state and federal spending for corrections totaled $60 billion.  We employ about 750,000 people in corrections nationally.  Corrections, imprisonment in particular, is big and so many young men enter and leave our prisons that we fail to pay attention to their experience of confinement at grave risk to the quality of our civic life.

What happened in Abu Ghraib was a "perfect storm" of mistakes and oversights.  Everything that you should not do, they did.  Everything you should do, they didn't.  The leadership at the top has to create a culture based on values, a culture that defines those in custody as citizens and human beings with rights.  If administrators don't speak in those terms, nobody will.

 As we discussed the idea for this talk, Chris counseled me to avoid sounding defensive or to feel as though I have to justify the American prison system.  Good advice.  Suffice to say that by and large, in my estimation, the American prison system does what it is asked to do in protecting public safety fairly well.  That there is too much of it, is a discussion for another day.  That prison stinks and the intake process and strip-searching is humiliating, and we can do better, of course.  But remember that this system was considered a reform in its day; it replaced corporal punishment, public humiliation and mass solitary confinement.  Inmates in American prisons and jails are not routinely and systematically subjected to torture. Few escape and most inmates are released physically healthy and whole.

But we can't just say we are different and move on.  Truth be told, acts of brutality and degradation happen in America's prisons.  In my personal experience I have seen the effects of systematic brutality at Greene prison in southwestern Pennsylvania, in the recent Sheppard case, the City settled a claim resulting from allegations that there was a pattern and practice of brutality in its Central Punitive Segregation Unit, effectively condoned by the top administration of the Department.  And just last week, I agreed to settle a case involving several officers who had clearly used excessive force against inmates in retaliation for the inmates' beating of a fellow officer. 
 
John DiIulio, in his book Governing Prisons states, "prison management may be the single most important determinant of the quality of prison life..." I have often observed in my own experience that prisons, after a while, take on the personality of their leader.  Or, as one of my more colorful union leaders likes to say, " a fish rots from the head down."  I don't know if he's right, but the point is that what happens in a prison, what happened in Abu Ghraib is ultimately the responsibility of its leadership and whatever happened occurred because it was encouraged, tacitly or explicitly.  This was no coincidence and this was not some "infection" of the United States Army by a couple of good old boy correction officer reservists from Appalachia. 

But why do these things occur at all?  Do they occur because the people who commit these acts, Charles Graner and 21-year-old Lynndie England are evil?  Do they occur because they are blindly following orders? Or do they occur because they are a natural outcome of the situation in which they find themselves?  Do we need to define the perpetrators as different to reassure ourselves that we would never do those things?  Do we need to find a way to dissociate ourselves from the actions committed in our name?

That people can do these things is no surprise.  In 1971, Phillip Zimbardo created a "Potemkin Prison" in the basement of a Stanford University classroom building.  He assigned students to roles as prisoners or guards, the prisoners living in that setting day and night while the "guards" worked rotating 8-hour shifts.  (Would any IRB today approve this experiment?)  And the results?   In a recent article Zimbardo wrote, "...the negative situational forces overwhelmed the positive dispositional tendencies.  The Evil situation triumphed over the good people.  Our projected two week experiment had to be terminated after only six days because of the pathology we were witnessing."   He concluded that, " personality and situations interact to generate behavior, ...situations exert more power over human actions than has been generally acknowledged by most psychologists nor recognized by the general public."  Do evil situations lead to evil acts?

 The reasons people in positions of authority in the coercive atmosphere of a jail or prison commit heinous acts of brutality are too complex for us to examine fully here today.  Zimbardo believes that the situation can drive the behavior; Adorno believed referred to the authoritarian personality, more often possessed by persons attracted to certain fields of endeavor, prison work for one.  Stanley Milgram who performed an experiment similar to Zimbardo in 1974 concluded that obedience to authority could lead ordinary people to commit acts of torture.  Milgram's work identified additional ingredients that increase the likelihood ordinary people will follow direction to do bad things.  Among these "accelerators," as I call them, are ideology and propaganda, giving participants roles of importance that are attached to socially defined higher statuses, e.g. teacher, leader; diffusing the responsibility; starting small; making exit costs high, and defining as just, that which is inherently unjust.
 
In Iraq, the soldiers had to create their own structure.  One can't help but notice the absence of Lieutenants and Captains in the pictures.  There was no responsible adult present.  Without proper training and supervision they took cues from their environment to create structure where none existed and what better way to bond than to take action against an enemy?  As in Lord of the Flies those who were more aggressive and authoritative by nature or knowledge became leaders in the absence of legitimate leadership. 

Let's think for just a moment about the lives of corrections workers.  It is remarkable there are so few incidents when we consider that over two million inmates are interacting most of every day with 750,000 staff.  I can't do the math, but the number of bad encounters seems very small by that measure.  All you have to do is read the overnight reports that cross my desk to recognize what is asked of them is that they be better than the average person in responding to these situations.   They internalize their anger and their shame and not a week goes by that we don't see evidence of alcoholism, stress leading to divorce and other symptoms of a troubled workforce.  This is why good training and supervision is so important. 

Jim Gilligan writes of the role of shame in promoting violence.  In Lucien Lombardo's 1981 book, Guards Imprisoned, one of the few studies of officer behavior and attitudes, he points out that the wives of many of the officers interviewed stated they knew little of the job their husbands did.  I will tell you from personal experience that raising two children while working in prison and parole I rarely if ever discussed my work at home.

Lombardo quotes one officer explaining his reluctance to discuss his work with his wife, "What am I going to say? Gee, honey, I looked in three guy's assholes for contraband today; or boy, I wrote a guy up for taking an extra pork chop?"  And in Newjack Ted Conover observes, "For all the time I spent in an officer's uniform, one poignant reality of the life had only begun to sink in, and that was the depth of the stigma they (officers) felt, the pain of society's disregard." 
 
Prisons require legitimacy to operate.  On any given day there are more prisoners than officers and prisons are the ultimate proof of the concept of governing by consent of the governed.  Unlike in Abu Ghraib, where inmates were released singly, most American prisons rely on congregate activity, meals, recreation and so on, to operate.  If prisoners were being routinely and systematically brutalized they would withdraw legitimacy from their keepers. Indeed, the evidence throughout American history is that they can and they do, witness Attica, the Tombs, Lucasville, Rahway and Camp Hill.  Systematic and routine brutality results in the loss of legitimacy.

And there is, after all, the rule of law.  When the top officials of a jurisdiction conclude that the law doesn't apply to them it doesn't take long for prisons and jails to become lawless places.  Prisons and jails are places where organizational culture has powerful influence.  Because of the constant presence of danger and the unpredictability of it, officers bond.  If the culture is one that values human life, one that respects the individual and the rule of law and is based on integrity the outcomes will be substantially different than if the culture devalues the individual.  Only leaders can create such an atmosphere and that is ultimately their most important task.

How we define our custodial responsibilities makes a difference.  Certainly the Abu Ghraib inmates were not treated as prisoners of war, subject to the Geneva Conventions.  The mentality that labels our adversaries "evil doers," and "ragheads" is the same mentality that labeled the Viet Cong "gooks." Dehumanization of people in our charge allows the brutal treatment of them.  The fact that most inmates in the United States are citizens and not enemies should make a difference.  The fact of that citizenship should make what we saw in Iraq far more unlikely in our prisons and rare when it does occur.   But what we have seen, and know, tells us that not even citizenship protects all inmates. And, even though they were not citizens of our country subject to our constitution, the victims of the abuse in Abu Ghraib were citizens of someplace and entitled to the protection of some law.   They are human beings, deserving of treatment in accordance with standards of decency simply for that reason.
 
In our system, inmates are entitled to certain legal protections not available in Iraq.  First among these is unrestricted access to their attorney and the ability to appear before a judge and register their complaints.  Again, they can and they do. 

Inmates in the United States, unlike prisoners at Abu Ghraib, have unlimited and virtually unrestricted access to the mails and the right to privileged correspondence with elected officials, attorneys, judges and oversight bodies.   This right is worthy of protection and recent incursions on it are reason for concern. Their right to correspond with and speak with the press is robust and well protected.  Witness the recent furor over the "Son of Sam," David Berkowitz's ability to post his writing on the Internet. To a large extent in most jurisdictions they have access to the telephone as well.  And inmates in American prisons receive visits from friends and family to whom they can report abuses.    

In American prisons, health care meeting the community standard of care is mandated by law, and because of the history of constitutional litigation in this arena is the norm in most jurisdictions.  Medical personnel, professionally bound to a standard of ethics and professional licensure, offer another check on the brutality that might occur.  Religious volunteers have frequent contact with inmates and the ability to "bear witness" to what goes on in prisons and jails. 

An active prisoners right bar in the United States has brought the Courts into the day-to-day life of every prison and jail in the United States.  Monitors, Special Masters and activist judges in the tradition of Morris Lasker throughout the country have reduced the likelihood that what we saw in Abu Ghraib will be more than an exception in the day-to-day life of American prisons and jails.  Some would argue the recent Prison Litigation Reform Act is a step towards elimination of this protection, I don't subscribe to that belief but I agree that the ability of the Courts to intervene in a reasonable way when corrections administrators fail in their responsibilities is deserving of protection.

In many jurisdictions oversight bodies are authorized to visit prisons and jails and report on abuses.  This oversight can take many forms.  In New York we have the State Commission on Corrections, the City Board of Corrections and the Correctional Association.  In Pennsylvania the responsibility to establish standards and inspect the county jails was vested in the State Corrections Secretary answerable to the General Assembly for the operation of all the jails as well as the prisons in the Commonwealth.  The Pennsylvania Prison Society, founded in 1787 had a charter from the General Assembly giving them the right to visit prisons and jails and speak to prisoners as they saw fit.  

While I have been know to complain about the oversight, I recognize the role these organizations play in assuring that our prisons and jails are not places of systemic misbehavior.  This is what I refer to as transparency, the opening of the goings on in prisons and jails to public scrutiny.  These important mechanisms do not exist everywhere and require vigilance if they are to continue to protect us.

Investigation and honest open reporting of these incidents when they do occur is also a prerequisite to extinguishing these behaviors.  If we don't measure it we must not think it important. 

In Abu Ghraib, what we saw was poorly trained officers, probably feeling the shame and stigma described by Conover and Lombardo, unsupervised; left to their own devices and influenced by intelligence officers who were creating the justification Milgram describes to rationalize their acts.   I can't imagine running a prison or jail without Lieutenants, Captains and tour commanders.    Management of prisons and jails can't be done from a desk. I found remarkable General Karpinski's absence from the scene and the way in which intelligence assumed the role of prison administrators.  That would be like me allowing the NYPD to send detectives into the cellblocks to tell my officers how to treat the inmates so they would confess.  Simply unacceptable.  There is a reason we shouldn't allow the police to run the jails. 

It is clear that given the right set of circumstances, or the absence of other circumstances otherwise normal individuals can engage in unspeakable acts.  This can be avoided, imperfectly but not without effect, by values based leadership.  A culture that defines persons committed to custody as citizens and, more importantly, human beings, fosters respect for the individual.  Managers and supervisors must be ever present.  Training, doctrine, supervision, procedures, oversight and transparency make a difference.  

The lives of correctional workers must become as interesting to us as the lives of the incarcerated.  The work of corrections must be invested with meaning and purpose.  At Abu Ghraib, there was no concept of rehabilitation or salvation underlying the operation of that jail.  Without a higher purpose places of confinement lose their way.   We have seen some of the same problems in Immigration detention facilities where the inmates are neither citizens nor souls to be saved.  Absent purpose, without being a Department of Correction we are only keepers.  Workers who see themselves as engaged in a mission to build their communities and protect public safety are less likely to engage in the acts we saw in Abu Ghraib.  Let's give some thought too to the fact that while not all the reservists working in these military confinement facilities were correction officers in their everyday lives, many were. They will be bringing home with them what they learned and the shame they carry.  Charles Graner learned his corrections practices as a U.S. Marine before joining the Pa. Department of Corrections; he served six years as an MP prior to leaving the service the first time.   It is not uncommon after large military mobilizations for former military personnel to find their way to corrections.  How we integrate them into our workforce presents challenges we haven't begun to think about.

Too much growth too fast causes prisons to outstrip their ability to groom and train middle managers.  Maturity matters in prison administration and promoting too fast leaves an experience deficit that the staff will fill on their own.  That is why the rate of prison growth and the size of prisons are relevant.   Systems and individual institutions that are too large are more difficult to manage. 

Where we put prisons and jails matters too.  When we build places of confinement far from the view of public scrutiny we send a political message that the inmates confined there are not deserving of the care of the community they come from.  Don't doubt for a minute that the keepers and the bosses will draw that inference.

In the end, the implication of Abu Ghraib for America's prisons is that it can happen here.  But we shouldn't generalize from this situation to every prison and jail in America. It is possible to create an atmosphere in which brutality is the exception and where respect for law and civil behavior are modeled for inmates.  It only happens when society demands that those in charge understand their responsibility and the bad outcomes that result from inattentiveness to this task, and hold elected officials and prison managers accountable.

I am reminded of a story involving Ben Ward, a former Vera staffer and Board member.  In 1974 Ben was appointed Corrections Commissioner of New York State.  Remember, this was barely three years after Attica and Ben was the first African American to hold that position.  And we are talking State corrections here, Attica, Dannemora, Elmira, Napanoch-places where even more recently than 1974, Ben's successors have had to deal with Correction Officers openly affiliated with the Klan.  Upon making his first visit to Attica, Ben visits the Warden at his state-provided home-in those days State wardens got homes and cooks and maids-and as he drives up he observes a black inmate tending a lovely putting green in front of the very large white Victorian mansion in which the Warden lived. 

He later told me all he saw was the master's house at the plantation. Today wardens in New York are not provided mansions to live in, nor are they provided maids and cooks.  They instead are paid a professional salary, subject to taxation that the homes in those days weren't, and required by a law he proposed to possess the kind of academic training and experience we would agree a modern prison administrator should have.  If the warden allows the inmates to be seen as slaves, we should not be surprised that brutality happens. In 1974 Ben Ward set the tone for how New York would run its prisons, in Iraq, nobody did the same.