Al Jazeera has two stories that are unrelated but probably should be juxtaposed. First, the story of US soldiers who killed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.
Morlock told the judge, Lieutenant Colonel Kwasi Hawks, that he and the other soldiers began plotting to murder unarmed Afghans in late 2009. To make the killings appear justified, the soldiers planned to plant weapons near the victims’ bodies, Morlock said.
Asked by the judge what his intent was, Morlock replied, “The plan was to kill people.”
“Did everybody know, `We’re killing people who are completely innocent’?” the judge asked.
“Generally, yes, sir, everyone knew,” Morlock replied.
Morlock is the first of five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade to be court-martialed — something his lawyer Geoffrey Nathan characterised as an advantage.
“The first up gets the best deal,” Nathan said by phone Tuesday, noting that even under the maximum sentence, Morlock would serve no more than eight years before becoming eligible for parole.
No solitary confinement requirement? And that brings me to the second story called “Cruel and Usual”; there has been a huge increase in solitary confinement for prisoners in America.
The spectre of Bradley Manning lying naked and alone in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Base, less than 50 miles from Washington, DC, conjures up images of an American Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where isolation and deprivation have been raised to the level of torture.
In fact, the accused Wikileaker, now in his tenth month of solitary confinement, is far from alone in his plight. Every day in the US, tens of thousands of prisoners languish in “the hole”.
[…]
Over the past 30 years, their numbers have increased even faster than the US’ explosive incarceration rate; between 1995 and 2000, the growth rate for prisoners housed in isolation was 40 per cent, as compared to 28 per cent for the prison population in general, according to Human Rights Watch.
Likewise, no one can state with any consistency what these prisoners have done to warrant being placed in solitary confinement or what their isolation is supposed to accomplish.
As it stands, prisoners can be thrown into the hole for rule violations that range from attacking a guard or a fellow inmate to having banned reading materials or too many postage stamps.
In doling out months or even years in solitary, the warden and prison staff usually serve as prosecutor, judge and jury, and unsurprisingly they often abuse that power. The cases are shocking and they abound.
Compare and contrast. Manning is being given exceptionally harsh treatment, arguably tortured, which is said to be not terribly uncommon in the American prison system. Will Morlock thus end up in conditions as severe as Manning and, if so, how long will it take? Or could Morlock make an early parole and serve under eight years for his premeditated murder of unarmed civilians?