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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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None of this is accidental or a failure of the system. The system works as designed.
Correct. Im friendly with a CO who regularly gets derided for taking inmates to the infirmary when they say they're sick. The CO cultural MO seems to be everyone's faking it unless you can see blood or bone. The dudes proactivity has stopped what could have been a major flu outbreak and still they ride his ass when he brings sick inmates to the infirmary. Even the doctors working there dont like that he brings sick patients to them. It's rotten apples almost all the way down.
I imagine some of the problem is compassion fatigue - lots of prisoners are antisocial assholes who refuse to abide by society's rules (or they're just fucking criminally stupid).
It'd be tough to keep caring about that sort of group day in and day out.
I had a friend who was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. She told me she was going to police academy. I didn’t feel like she was the right kind of person for it because her family is full of drug addicts and she’s very bitter about it, which she has the right to be, it’s a rough life. I just worried she’d see addicts through the lens of her own issues, you know?
Well, somewhere along the way during police academy, she decided to become a CO for a bit. I had never told her about my own issues with addiction, but I decided that then was the time to do it. I thought that she would hear about my struggle and it would help to humanize the inmates a bit. Her response made me feel like I got to her. That made me feel better.
After a few months working there she started going on about those people as “animals”. She developed reputation for being a cruel and callous guard who reveled in the misery of the inmates on her watch.
She and I aren’t friends these days. She is a county cop now and I hope I never encounter her. I really do.
And that's the truth about ACAB. The system makes them bastards, whether they go in that way or not.
True, and this is why the system needs to provide mental health services for these caretakers too. Right now, you’ve got the overwhelmed and frustrated overseeing the overwhelmed and frustrated, which is a recipe for disasters like this. Add a profit motive, and now you’ve got yourself a stew going.
Got a close friend in CO training. They love him because he denies the inmates anything they ask for. Told him long before he started, they're going to change him for the worse. And it's happening.
The CO I know is close to retirement and cant wait for it. Its rough though because hes conveyed to me he knows it's going to be a worse place when hes gone but the amout of pushback he gets from the other officers to the Brass just isn't good for him, simply for trying to do the job as it's writren in the book. He's got a family himself and as bad as the system has always been, he didn't sign up for what it's become. Its no wonder they cant find new recruits like they used to. The money's right, the hours arent, the work isnt, and the cowerkers can be as dangerous as the inmates. Plus from the stories I'm told, you're almost necessarily going to see some shit you can not un see.
Sorry to tell you, your close friend is already a bad person. Good people don't volunteer to oppress people and deny their needs, especially after being told it's going to make them worse.
Something something the company you keep..
He's 21 with no education or skills. Here he gets offered a job that pays decently, has free training and has solid benefits, best thing he's ever been offered.
He has no idea what he's getting into. And now that he's into it, he's succeeding and being lauded for once in his life, told he's doing great, for once in his life.
Take your judgement on down the road. I'm doing what I can for him.
Oh, he's doing a great job and getting rewarded for treating people badly? Fuck that
My aunt is a doctor in a prison. She hates how long it will take for some people to be seen, sometimes because the guards just don’t think it’s a problem warranting taking them to the infirmary.
That's mega fucked, wow. ADAB? Nah, I wouldn't go that far.
Even if only subconsciously, this is exactly the same side of humanity that came out in the Holocaust.
The Nazis didn’t just exterminate people in the Holocaust. They also mistreated them horribly, tortured them, played sadistic mind games with them.
That same shit is in all of us, and it comes out if we don’t manage ourselves correctly.
A woman who breaks her neck in jail and doesn’t get treated for three days is not just a story of incompetence. It is a story of sadism. It’s a story of evil.
I don't believe this is true, I don't believe I personally could ever take pleasure in another's serious pain (i.e. doesn't include laughing at my friend slipping on a banana). While many in nazi germany may have had a bit of repressed sadism, many others had to be tricked or coerced into doing banal evil things.
It’s all about empathy. If you dehumanise a group enough they become “other” to your human subconscious, and you exhibit sociopathic behaviour toward them.
The problem is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you dehumanise someone to the smallest degree and feel guilt (because you’re still a good person), your subconscious will dehumanise them further in order to cope. (e.g they’re criminals so they’ve probably done worse). Then the next time you abuse them, it becomes easier.
This self perpetuating cycle keeps happening until you feel absolutely no sympathy for them, and consequently no guilt.
Now, the real question is whether or not you’re capable of dehumanising someone to begin with. I personally think that yes, we’re all capable, and all it takes is some bad influence (e.g bad preconceptions/media brainwashing), and in the case of police officers, a healthy dose of peer pressure.
I don't think dehumanization works on everybody. Dehumanization works on already kinda shitty people that view themselves as above others. I am not like that personally and I'm sure I'm not nearly the only one. I simply don't see myself as entitled to cause suffering in any other conscious being, human or not (except that which is necessary to sustain life as an omnivore -- which I am entitled as a living being).
You are not like that, currently. But in the right environment and in the right situation, you’ll find out that to the contrary, you are exactly like that.
Humans are wired to (justifiably or not) vilify anyone who’d pose a threat to their safety, or the safety of their loved ones. Vilify a person or group too many times (e.g with daily mass media brainwashing) and they will be completely dehumanised, eventually.
Now, that threat doesn’t have to be physical, or even real. Just perceived threat is enough. It doesn’t have to be substantiated either.
Look at every racist and extremist in existence and try to understand where they’re coming from. They weren’t born that way. Their environments made of them what they are.
You're right, I left out self-defense, which is in fact a situation where I would cause suffering, but this is not unnecessary suffering, it is necessary for my safety. And I would not go beyond what is needed for safety. Dehumanization does not apply here.
I know exactly where they are coming from. Racists are blaming a peoples for the perceived bad behavior from a subset of that group, prejudice, this is wrong and a sign of a shitty person.
I am a trans Mexican woman amongst other "undesirable" categories. My main enemy consists of a subset of white men, they are the ones primarily keeping me down, does it make sense for me to hate white people? Am I a decent person for being anti-white because some white people harm me? No.
I don't hate white men, I hate those individuals who may be white men, but I don't hate their color or sex, I hate their acts. I don't dehumanized white men.
So you’re saying that there’s a certain group of people that dehumanization works on? And a different group that it doesn’t work on? Two distinct categories of people?
Clearly, what's your point? There are many groupings people can be put into depending on perspective.
Only that dehumanization does not literally mean they don’t think the people are human.
What the word refers to is a situation in which moral vulnerabilities are present only in some other group, which the home group doesn’t fall prey too. That they’re a slightly different type of human, which is missing some moral safeguard and therefore presents a threat in a way the home group could never present.
We don't have a justice system. We have an incarceration industrial complex. It also doubles as a replacement for (now technically illegal) slave labor.