The Making of a Prison Society

"That's why you shouldn't bring kids to protests."

This taunt, which issued from the sneering lips of anarmored riot policeman, struck Don Joughin with the force of a billyclub as hetried to comfort his children – a three-year-old and a newborn – after they hadbeen showered with a chemical agent by a riot policeman.

That assault did not take place during any of the recent “Occupy”-inspiredprotests. It occurred in August 2002, during a fundraising visit by then-PresidentGeorge W. Bush to Portland, Oregon. 

In keeping with then-recently established “security”protocols, local police were deployed in riot gear to keepdemonstrators confined inside "free speech zones" located severalblocks away from the motorcade route. Joughin, who was accompanied by his wifeand three children, was present when police unleashed a pepper-spray fusilladeagainst a small group of protesters who had taken a few steps outside thedesignated protest zone.

After the police attack began, Joughin and his family attempted toleave, but found themselves penned in. Acting on the tragically innocentassumption that the police were present in order to keep the peace, Joughinpolitely asked the officer obstructing an exit how he and his family couldleave the turbulent intersection. "He pointed and said to exit to the[northeast], into the spraying police opposite him," Joughin recalled.

Don Joughin comforts his son after the infant suffered a pepper spray assault by a Portland cop.

 

With his family in danger of being trampled by protesters fleeing the chemical barrage, Joughin asked the officer to let him and hisfamily through. "He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip andsprayed directly at me," Joughin recalled. He didn't bear the bruntof that criminal assault, but his three-year-old caught some of the blast. Theassailant then turned on Joughin's wife and the infant "and doused both oftheir heads entirely from a distance of less than three feet," Joughin testified.

As his children were screaming in agony, Joughin pleaded with the cops to allowhim and his family to leave and seek help. They responded by closing ranks andblocking the Joughin family's escape. They didn't relent until someone in"authority" gave them permission to set them free. The last thingJoughin and his traumatized family heard as they left the scene was thesadistic taunt hurled by one of the tax-devouring thugs who had assaulted the children with a chemical weapon. 

While millions of Americans have been horrified by recent incidents of armored police officers beating and pepper-spraying unarmed,unresisting protesters, those nauseating spectacles are neither novel norparticularly rare. In “SecuritizingAmerica: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11September 2001 Terrorist Attacks,” a heavily sourced paper recentlypublished in the journal SociologyCompass,  Patrick F. Gillham of theUniversity of Idaho observes that current police doctrine dictates that publicprotests are to be treated as “security threats,” and dealt with using methodsinspired by “a new penology philosophy.”

From that perspective, every public demonstration -- however peaceful and orderly it might be --  is to be treatedas the equivalent of a prison riot. This means that police are free to employevery available means – pre-event surveillance, pre-emptive arrest,hostage-taking, and the use of incapacitating “less-lethal” weaponry – in orderto “neutralize” people suspected of being “disruptive” elements.

Illegal mass arrest in St. Paul, Minnesota.

 

Under the “strategic incapacitation” model, Gillham notes, “policeoften refuse to communicate at all with possible or actual transgressiveprotesters except to issue commands onceprotest events have already begun.” (Emphasis added.) It’s not enough toconfine protest to “free-speech zones”; the right to assemble itself is subject tomodification or revocation without prior notice – even in the absence of disorderlybehavior on the part of the protesters. 

Typically, phalanxes of riot police will appear and slowlyherd protesters into a confined area. An announcement will be made that thedemonstration has been designated an “unlawful assembly,” and shortlythereafter the attack will begin, typically culminating with either massarrests, needless injuries, or some combination thereof. 

A September 2001 anti-war protest in Washington, D.C.offered the first opportunity to field-test this approach. A small group ofanarchists were driven into an improvised holding area by riot police, wherethey were literally held as hostages: “After 2 hours of detention, policeconveyed the terms under which protesters would be released to a neutral thirdparty of legal observers and not to the detained protesters.”

Two years later, during the Free Trade Area of the Americassummit in Miami, “police not only pre-emptively arrested perceivedtransgressive protesters, they also arrested scores of union members andstudent activists walking to permitted events, as well as credentialed reportersand curious bystanders,” recalls Gillham. Most of those arrested had not beenordered to disperse, and had violated no law – including a draconiananti-assembly law that had been enacted by the city government just days priorto the summit. In addition, Gillham observes, “Bails were set high as a furtherway to keep those arrested off the streets.”

The same approach was used at both the Republican andDemocratic national conventions in 2008. In one particularly memorableapplication, 284 people were arrested at a public park in St. Paul, Minnesota onLabor Day 2008 during the Republican Convention. A huge contingent of riotpolice – supplemented by the NationalGuard’s JTF-RNC, and equipped with chemical munitions and gas masks -- cutoff access to the park, which was bordered on one side by train tracks and theother by a river. This turned the park, however temporarily, into ahuge open-air detention center.

An amplified version of the same tactics was employed bypolice in Pittsburgh when the 2009 G-20 summit brought the crème de la scum ofthe world’s criminal class to that city.

As helicopters plied the night air and serried rows ofarmored riot police assembled, a robotic voice announced:“By order of the chief of police, this has been declared an unlawful assembly.I order all those assembled to immediately disperse. You must leave theimmediate vicinity. If you do not disperse, you may be subject to arrest,and/or other police action” – the latter being a euphemism for summarypunishment through “the use of riot control agents and/or less lethalmunitions.” 

Once again, protesters were ordered to leave, and threatenedwith severe reprisals if they didn’t – only to find that the police already hadthem surrounded and were determined to arrest and assault at least some ofthem. 

Those crackdowns, in keeping with the “strategic incapacitation”doctrine, were not employed in response to criminal violence, or to deal withany impending threat of the same. Gillham points out that under the newapproach “arrests are selectively applied to neutralize known or suspectedtransgressive actors often times before any crimes are committed.” 

The same is true of aggressive violence employed by riotpolice, notes Gillham: “Less-lethal weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray,Tasers, rubber bullets, wooden missiles and bean bag rounds are now the weaponsof choice…. Evidence suggests that police use these weapons as a means totemporarily incapacitate potentially disruptive protesters and repel othersaway from areas police are trying to defend such as entrances and exits tosecured zones.” 

Of course, once the riot police appear and the decree goesforth that a given protest is an “unlawful assembly,” the protest area itselfis designated a “secure zone,” and those within it can only leave with thepermission of their captors. 

Thugswarm: Riot police assault female student in Pittsburgh.

All of this is manifestly the product of a military mind-set– one better suited to a military prison camp than a battlefield. The behaviorof domestic police in dealing with political demonstrations is nearly identicalto that of specialized “Immediate Reaction” forces (IRFs) deployed  in militaryprisons such as those at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base inAfghanistan.

In his memoir, FiveYears of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, Turkish national MuratKurnaz – who was kidnapped by Pakistani bounty hunters and sold into U.S.custody for $3,000 – describes his captivity in Gitmo (as well as Bagram) as a supposed “unlawful combatant." Any violation of the arbitrary -- and ever-changing-- rules of prisoner conduct provoked an attack by the IRF, a unit consistingof "five to eight soldiers with plastic shields, breastplates,hard-plastic knee-, elbow-, and shoulder-protectors, helmets with plasticvisors, gloves with hard-plastic knuckles, heavy boots, and billyclubs."In other words, they were accoutered exactly like the domestic riot police whohave become such a familiar presence in recent weeks.

Breaking a rule wasn’t a prerequisite for a visit from the IRF. The team wouldbe summoned to inflict punishment for any act of defiance -- such as an insult hurled at an abusive guard, or even an attemptto exercise. Typically the IRF would soften up the target by infusing the cell witha liberal dose of Megyn Kelly’s much-discussed “food product” – weaponized capsaicin.Once the prisoner had been left entirely incapacitated, the IRT would swarm himto deliver a beating.

Former military interrogator Erik Saar provides a parallel accountin his remorseful memoir, Inside the Wire.

“The five IRF-team MPs lined up outside the cell door,”writes Saar. “Starting in the back, they each shouted `Ready!’ and one by oneslapped the shoulder of the next soldier up. The first soldier opened the doorand directed a good dose of pepper spray at the detainee, then started to backhim into a corner with his shield. But the captive managed to swipe the shieldaway and tried to kick the second soldier in line. He landed a good blow to theshoulder, but before he could put his foot down the third soldier, thinkingfast, grabbed it and jerked. The detainee’s body rose in the air and camecrashing to the metal floor.”

“All five MPs swarmed over him,” continues Saar’s account. “Onewas responsible for securing his head, and the other four were supposed to takeone limb each. The detainee was kicking and squirming, fueled by his hostility.Mo [an Army translator] was shouting to him in Arabic to stop resisting. One ofthe stronger soldiers who had a solid grip on one arm was punching him in theribs….” 

 Nearly identical tactics were used at “CampGreyhound” in New Orleans, an improvised jail modeled after Gitmo and operatedby FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Among those imprisoned there wasSyrian-American businessman Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who was seized in his own homeby National Guardsmen, imprisoned on unspecified charges, and escaped with hislife only because of the providential intervention of a Christian clergyman whohappened to visit his cell after Zeitoun had been transferred to the Elayn Hunt CorrectionalCenter. 

For Zeitoun and the other prisoners, the Camp Greyhoundexperience was one of tedium punctuated by sheer terror. The guards exploitedany excuse to inflict exemplary "discipline" on the detainees, mostof whom had been arrested for violating curfew or similar petty matters.

"Always the procedure was the same," recalled DavidEggers in his book Zeitoun;"a prisoner would be removed from his cage and dragged to the groundnearby, in full view of the rest of the prisoners. His hands and feet would betied, and then, sometimes with a guard's knee on his back, he would be sprayeddirectly in the face" with pepper spray. "If the prisoner protested,"continued Eggers, "the knee would dig deeper into his back. The sprayingwould continue until his spirit was broken. Then he would be doused with [a]bucket and returned to his cage."

The victims of this pointless and whimsical cruelty included one disturbed manwith the intellectual and emotional capacity of a child who was"punished" because he displayed the irrepressible symptoms of mentalillness.

FEMA camp survivor: Abdulrahman Zeitoun with his family.

These ritual acts of sadism, Eggers observes, were "born of a combinationof opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport." They were intended totorment the other prisoners, most of whom -- like Zeitoun – were possessed ofmore decency than their captors and thus left sick with rage by the spectacleof helpless men being tortured.

"Under any normal circumstances [Zeitoun] would have leapt to the defenseof a man victimized as that man had been," observes Eggers. "But thathe had to watch, helpless, knowing how depraved it was -- this was punishmentfor the others, too. It diminished the humanity of them all."

The same treatment continued once Zeitoun was transferred from the makeshiftFEMA detention camp to a “regular” prison. For more than two weeks he and hiscellmate were abused, insulted, humiliated, and treated to a visit from aGitmo-style "Extreme Repression Force" (ERP). Swaddled in riotgear, wielding ballistic shields, batons, and other weapons, the ERP"burst in as if [Zeitoun] were in the process of committing murder,"writes Eggers. "Cursing at him, three men used their shields to push himto the wall. As they pressed his face against the cinderblock, they cuffed hisarms and shackled his legs."

After heroically subduing an unresisting man -- who by this time was dealingwith an infected foot and a mysterious kidney ailment -- the ERP tore apart thecell before forcing the victim to strip and submit to another body cavitysearch. By some oversight, the ERP neglected to use pepper spray on theinnocent and helpless man. All of the prisoner-control tactics used in Gitmo and "Camp Greyhound" have been employed against peaceful protesters in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere

 

Civil libertarians are understandably concerned about sections 1031 and 1032 of the proposedNational Defense Authorization Act, which would authorizethe indefinite military detention of Americans – including those seizedhere in the United States – who are suspected of terrorism. That abhorrentmeasure represents an enhancement of current policies and procedures, ratherthan an abrupt departure from them. Whether or not the Senate approves theNDAA, the people in charge of Regime Security already consider this country tobe one vast military prison, and are willing to act on that assumption wheneverthe opportunity presents itself. 

Obiter Dicta 

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