Category: Personal

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates….

The man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

I believe that in 50 or 100 years, people will look back on the American prison system of the late 20th and early 21st century the way we look back on Jim Crow now: as having been evidently racist and abhorrent. The disproportion of minorities in prison, coupled with the horrific abuse that is tolerated there, amounts to a systematic torture and dehumanization of certain ethnic groups in urban areas, where up to a third of young men spend at least some time behind bars. The American prison system is both inhumane and ineffectual, and therefore immoral. Let us hope that the shock of the abuses at Abu Ghraib sparks a movement to clean up our prisons here at home.

Expectations for our current president have always been low. He received an inordinate amount of credit after 9/11 simply for making his way through a passable speech without bungling any key passages. So I admit that when I read that Bush had actually apologized for something, I was impressed. After all, this is the man who a few weeks ago, when asked at a press conference whether he’d made any mistakes while president, couldn’t think of any.

The trouble is, Bush apologized to the wrong person.

Mysteriously, President Bush did not actually apologize in public to the Iraqi people, the U.S. military, or the American people. Instead, he apologized to King Abdullah II of Jordan, then came outside and described the apology.

This is just weird. I mean, let’s put this in everyday terms. Imagine that the local police wrongfully kick in your door and throw you to the ground and smash your furniture. There was a mixup with the address, and you were unfairly harmed. The police chief decides to do the right thing and apologize, but instead of phoning you up or inviting you to his office, he phones up the police chief of the neighboring town and apologizes to him, then publicly describes that apology without ever addressing you directly. No compensation is offered for your broken door or your humiliation, either. But the police chief has apologized ? to someone, anyway ? and that should be enough.

That a misdirected apology is so clearly a step in the right direction just shows how far this president has taken us in the wrong direction.

The Iraqi prison scandals keep getting worse, and then worse still, all as the White House has just asked the Supreme Court to approve its indefinite detention policy at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

There are so many reasons to be horrified. Tactically and politically, these crimes have turned us from bungling intruders in Iraq to downright scoundrels, making it all the more dangerous for our troops there and further reducing our already slim chances for any success. Morally and ethically, the whole approach to imprisonment is dictatorial. It’s the kind of thing you read about having happened under Pinochet or Stalin or Franco — or Saddam Hussein — and shudder. It’s the kind of policy that, as a Jew, I was taught to see as the first steps down the surprisingly short road from liberal democracy to Nazi death camps. No, I don’t think we’re going to slip that far — I have some confidence in our country and in our midlevel civil servants — but the problem is that our behavior has ceased to be different in kind and is now only different in scale from that of the dictators we claim to oppose.

Bococa.com, the fine little website that provided restaurant menus and event listings and the like for our beloved neighborhood (that’s BOerum Hill, CObble Hill and CArroll Gardens, of course), is getting ambitious. They’ve changed their name to BrooklynNow.com and plan expand their coverage to the Columbia Street Waterfront District, Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO and Park Slope — just in time for summer, when I can indulge in my favorite New York pastime of exploring new neighborhoods and then eating in them.

In 1901, while the subways were still under construction, New York City converted its streetcars from horsepower to electricity, which allowed them to move much faster — especially in Brooklyn, where the traffic was less dense. So frenetically did these new electric cars hurtle through the streets that Brooklynites began to call themselves “trolley dodgers.” Around that time, a local baseball team that had been known as the Superbas, the Kings, and the Bridegrooms, became the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Words fail.