I was sickened to read how people are being treated in ICE detention camps.
Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
…Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.
The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.
“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.
“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”
When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.
The sheer meanness with which these detainees are being treated should shock the conscience of any decent human being.
Let us be perfectly clear. There is no way that this ‘just happened’. They are being treated this way deliberately. It is policy. It is meant to degrade and dehumanize. It is what happens when people are given unlimited power over others. For some, it unleashes their worst sadistic impulses and, unchecked, they treat their fellow human beings like dirt.
It is stories like this that make me despair of the human race, revealing how thin is the veneer of civilized behavior that people supposedly live by and how easily it is discarded for naked brutality.
Abu Ghraib all over again.
Except, even less oversight/accountability this time.
I should be shocked that US prison guards are being mean? Come on.
The only shocking thing is how few of their prisoners have been shot.
<Camp Kommandant inner monologue> “They’re sending me so many now, they must think it’s OK. I would have got into trouble for this before. But now it’s OK.”
Didn’t Philip Zimbardo establish in 1971 that exactly this would happen?
Any job that involves effectively unchecked power over others naturally attracts sadists. Fortunately, it isn’t really true that anyone will behave in this way given the right circumstances, and contrary to bluerizlagirl@4, no, Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” did not prove they would -- the article at bluerizlagirl’s link gives some of the criticisms of the experiment.
This was always inevitable.
Even if you somehow believe that the organisations involved are universally staffed by exemplary professionals with the highest regard for human rights (ha!), there’s simply not enough capacity in the relevant systems to handle anything like the number of detentions and deportations that the regime is demanding without things going horribly wrong.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it was always going to be case of a bunch of sadistic racist goons being given free rein to indulge their worst impulses. And it’s going to get worse -- a lot worse. People are going to die. Potentially quite a lot of them. Perhaps not through deliberate murder -- at least not at first -- but as a result of overcrowding, mistreatment, bad conditions, inadequate nutrition, and medical neglect.