Tom's column this week

The prisons we build: the company we keep

In a famous experiment on sensory deprivation conducted years ago, a researcher sewed shut a newborn kitten's eye. Weeks later, when the scientist exposed the same eye, it was found to be useless. The profound lack of visual stimulation had permanently turned off that portion of the feline's brain.
Humans conduct such cruel experiments on one another all the time. Most of the horror stories we hear involve parents who abuse their children systematically over years, leaving them socially and mentally retarded in the worst way.

Such torture of innocents is easy to condemn, but when states engage in egregious acts in the name of security, rationalizations are a whole lot easier to come by.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Early column sighting: The Press of Atlantic City

Comments

[Elmer Humes]

If we do not have life in prison how do we protect the victims? My best friend & his wife age 71 have been attacked twice by their son who currently is in prison for his last murder attempt; but the weak South Carolina system keeps setting him free. Life in prison is awful, but until we have a better means of protecting innocent victims their needs deserve highest priority!

[Duncan Harvey]

Tom, this article seems to me to be one sided.Until you stop terrorists from bombing innocent Isrealis there is no point to dealing with the Pallestinians problems. Also youseem to let the Palestinians off the hook?, why can't they see the errors of their ways and themselves rise up and take revolution to the terrorists?, or is it because its to convenient to blame someone else for their own problems?As for we here in the USA, how much justice or what is justice for a murdering rapist of say an 11 year old girl? I think sir, respectfully you need to further expand your remarks on this issue when you have time!

[hof]

Easter week is such a great time to come out in favor of torturing and killing those found guilty of crimes by the state. You don't need to be a Christian to understand that torture and killing don't work, just a pragmatist.

[Tom Barnett]

When I say something nice about Israel, it's considered balanced.

When I don't, it's clearly one-sided.

[vinny]

The Israel/Palestine problem seems like a forgone conclusion. For the foreseeable future Israel is going to do whatever it wants regardless of what anyone says because it has the support of the U.S. It seems that the Israelies are escalating the Palestinine problem by causing divisions among the Palestinines themselves - the oldest tactic in the book: divide and conquer. The Palestinines are falling for it. No unity, Why can't the Palestinine society ever produce a Gandhi?

[stuart abrams]

Thank you for calling attention to the problem of excessive incarceration in the U.S., a major problem that is largely ignored and, as you point out, is impossible for the political branches of government to address (nothing is more effective than an attack ad accusing an opponent of being "soft on crime"). This is the major weakness of our constitution - there are certain really tough issues that the political branches of government are simply incapable of dealing with; John Quincy Adams wrote a very interesting letter on the proclivity of our system to hide the most important political issues of the day. When a situation like this arises, that's usually when good old "judicial activism" comes to the rescue. Unfortunately, the judicial branch doesn't always get it right. Slavery was such an issue and SCOTUS stepped in to break the political deadlock with Dred Scott, which effectively made the right own slaves a constitutional right; abortion was another such issue and the result was Roe v. Wade (I leave it to others to say whether SCOTUS was right or wrong on that one). SCOTUS is already weighing in on our "hidden" national problem of over-incarceration by striking down mandatory sentencing laws, often on novel constitutional theories. Interestingly, Scalia has been in the forefront in doing this.

[Michael]

Mr HarveyOne could just as easily say "Until you deal with the Palestinian problems, there's no point trying to stop the terrorists."

Like crime, there's a short term and long term element to the problem. Ignore the short term (stopping the terrorists and criminals already out there) and the long term doesn't come to pass. Ignore the long term (dealing with the problems that tend to produce terrorists and criminals), and you're stuck in an eternal now. He isn't saying to ignore the terrorists or the criminals, he's saying that we need to try to avoid creating more of them.