Schools For Scoundrels - Prison, Congress, And The Great American Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies have  life of their own, organic wholes, amoeba-like organisms that never disappear, just  morph into something else that occupies space and time. 

It was about time that President Trump went after these drudgeries, understanding that if anything they were brakes on innovation, creativity, and insight - great holding pens for those who liked stability, a regular paycheck, a promised pension, and little more. 

The meme and ethos of a bureaucracy is inertia - it is very hard to move it, stop it, or change it; and that is the whole point, an extra-judicial and -legislative institution that is a malleable, indistinguishable, and largely indecipherable body. One can get lost inside one, do nothing for years, then emerge and retire happily. 

Public institutions all have the same character of inertia - it is as hard to change the way a legislative body goes about its business as a judicial one or a bureaucratic one.  All are in it to survive, prosper personally, and expand.  Whatever resources available are fodder, whatever electrical outlet on the wall is ready to be plugged in. 

Politics as an institution is no different, fueled by human nature, animated by circumstance and opportunity, and hungry for whatever is lying around the table. Congress is a routine, uninspiring, pedestrian place of venal interests, short term aspirations, and horrific apathy.  

The wild howls leveled against Trump are not coherent statements drawn from logical reserves, but firebrands lit, burned, and brandished when there is no juice left in the blender.  The whole place has been a charade and always has been, a barnyard of rubes.

 

All of which is to say that we should not be upset by the glacial speed, predictability, lack of creativity or innovation of any of these institutions, for they are our ideal public homes. 

So, what about prisons? They should follow the same institutional rules. Not so, for in the worst maximum security prisons like Angola (LA) it is the inverse.  The whole world of white middle class civics and ethics is turned on its head.  The inversion of traditional morality is so profound that it is not simply inversion, but perversion. 

On a recent trip to the Deep South, a traveler noticed this sign:



He had recently spent time working in Angola – the country – and wondered how the prison got its name.  Over 50 percent of slaves in the Americas had come from the region which is now Angola, and the penitentiary had once been a slave plantation:

Angola prison, the maximum security state penitentiary of Louisiana is the biggest prison in America. Built on the site of a former slave plantation, the 1,800-acre penal complex is home to more than 5,000 prisoners, 85 percent of whom will die there. Also known as the Farm, Angola took its name from the homeland of the slaves who used to work its fields, and in many ways still resembles a slave plantation today. Eighty per cent of the prisoners are African-Americans and under the surveillance of armed guards on horseback, they still work fields of sugar cane, cotton and corn, for up to 16 hours a day.

The traveler had always been fascinated by prisons because they are inversions of society.  The same rules of human nature apply among inmates – survival and extension of authority – but since Angola is a maximum security facility where many inmates are serving life sentences for murder, there are fewer consequences to the violent expressions of it, and in such a lawless environment, even more reason to lose whatever socialized patterns of regularized life on the outside.  

One cannot even begin to imagine the brutality of a society without consequences.  The inversion is even more twisted, since the guards, faced with the pure, unalloyed menace of violent inmates who long ago shed the last vestiges of usual morality, also lose theirs: 

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified…to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago.   These twenty-five inmates -- who were not involved in the escape attempt -- testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. 

They were also threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons.  They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves.  They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials.  One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years. 

Rape and sexual assault have always been features of prison life, and rape has been a tool of war recently documented in the ethnic conflicts of Africa; so it is not surprising that it takes on more than a sexual dimension in prison: “Everything and everybody in here worked to keep you a whore –even the prison,” explained James Dunn, a prisoner and one time sex slave in Angola prison.

If a whore went to the authorities, all they’d do is tell you that since you [are] already a whore, they couldn’t do nothing for you, and [that you should] go back to the dorm and settle down and be a good old lady. Hell, they’d even call the whore’s old man up and tell him to take you back down and keep you quiet … the most you’d get out of complaining is some marriage counseling, with them talking to you and your old man to iron out your difficulties.”

A veteran corrections officer, also from Louisiana, described a
similar situation in a recent letter to a newspaper: “There are
prison administrators who use inmate gangs to help manage the prison. Sex and human bodies become the coin of the realm. Is inmate ‘X’ writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and filing lawsuits?

Or perhaps he threw urine or feces on an employee? ‘Well, Joe, you and Willie and Hank work him over, but be sure you don’t break any bones and send him to the hospital. If you do a good job, I’ll see that you get the blondest boy in the
next shipment.’” 

This is what Angola and the rest of the public sector share - a lack of consequences and accountability.  Oh sure, politicians lose their seats and bureaucrats get transferred, but all in all the public sector is a free ride.  Government is just as inverted - perverted - as Angola prison.