Justice American style again

Some of us have read the complaints of accused criminals who have been "lit up" by corrections officers in jails or brutalized in prison. And it's not difficult to find accounts of similar treatment inflicted on illegal aliens held in ICE detention facilities (the most notorious of which was built with the help of illegal immigrant labor, of course). But, hey - the perps had it coming, right? And why should we be upset if some border-jumper gets roughed up a bit? After all, isn't that how things are done al otro lado de la frontera?

Hearts unmoved by such cases tend to melt at the spectacle of a slender, helpless woman shrieking in fear and impotent rage as she is pinned down and violently disrobed by skinheads wearing the uniform of Ohio's Stark County Sheriff's Department.
Don't get me wrong: The outrage over the sexual violation of Ohio resident Hope Steffey, who was arrested, assaulted by police, strip-searched, and left naked in a cell for six hours, is eminently justified.

In fact, I earnestly hope that there will be much more outrage, that it goes thermonuclear, and that its radiating consequences include not only criminal charges against the simians in uniform who violated Hope, but also a dramatic increase in public curiosity about the routine sadism, perversion, and abuse that typify America's prison-industrial complex.

It must be understood that what happened to Hope - who was arrested after suffering an assault and calling the police for help - is uncommon only in that the abuse she suffered was inflicted on an uncommonly telegenic and sympathetic victim.

Fury over her experience in jail is coupled with outrage that this woman could begin the night as the victim of a private assault and end it as a victim of sexual molestation and battery under color of authority. And she was taken to jail on the flimsiest of pretexts, being arrested for resisting arrest - a tautological police tactic that is becoming increasingly common.

But what we have to remember is that Hope's evening from hell is not that unusual. In fact, her case isn't even unique for Ohio's Stark County jail system.

Last August, three teenage girls from Canton, Ohio filed suit against the Multi-County Juvenile Attention Center after a "scared straight" experience turned into a festival of sexual assault and humiliation.

In April of last year, the girls were charged with "criminal trespass on a public sidewalk" -- a charge as contrived as an arrest for resisting arrest - as a result of a fight that involved several other teenagers. The girls insist that they were innocent bystanders, a predictable claim that has the merit of being legally true: Rather than going to court, the girls agreed to perform 20 hours of "community service," attend school dutifully, and take a 15-minute "walk-through" of the juvenile "Attention Center."

According to the lawsuit, within minutes of their arrival at the juvenile jail, a "youth leader" -- that is, a guard - began to scream at them. When the girls reacted by giggling, a predictable adolescent reaction to tension, the tax-engorged cretin assaulted them, throwing them against the wall face-first while continuing to scream at them.

Led to the second floor of the facility, the girls were subjected to crude and denigrating sexual remarks. One guard - who should be fitted for a millstone (these are 13-year-old girls we're talking about) or at least beaten into jelly by the male relatives of his victims - made remarks about the girls' breasts. Another insinuated that one of the girls was a lesbian and displayed his unique charm by cracking a funny about that reliable comic staple, prison rape: "[The] other female inmates will love you because they love blondes."

Female guards then took the girls individually into a room where each of them was forced to strip and undergo a body cavity examination - while the male guards prowled just outside the doorway making derisive remarks. The girls were then forced to put on filthy jail attire - including unlaundered intimate wear. About a half-hour later they were given 30 seconds to change their clothes under the threat of staying in the jail overnight.

The girls then fled. The guards went back to "work" until their shifts ended and they could go back to surfing the 'Net for child porn, or whatever it is that skeevy, mouth-breathing degenerates of this sort do when they're not on the clock.

When the parents complained to the court about the sexual violation and physical battery endured by their daughters, Court Administrator Richard DeHeer parried the complaint by replying...

... let's all say it together ...

... that the juvenile jail staff "acted within its protocol."

This was essentially the same reaction Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson offered when the strip-search and sexual violation of Hope Steffey hit the local news.

First of all, insisted Swanson, his deputies acted in accordance with established policies - despite the fact that the Department's guidelines do not permit male deputies to be present when a female is being subjected to a strip search. Well, ah, y'see, what was done to Steffey wasn't a strip search, Swanson continued.

This leaves to the imagination of those unusually gifted in the art of conjuring euphemisms to devise a more suitable way of describing a procedure that involved tearing the clothes and undergarments from a terrified, resisting woman, leaving her, you know, naked and forcing her to swaddle herself in toilet paper to provide some scintilla of modesty, since she was still very much within eyeshot of the tonsured steroid junkies who had held her down and torn off her clothes.

Hope and her husband have likewise filed suit. And, like the lawsuit filed on behalf of the three teenage girls from Canton, Hope's complaint will never go to court. Some anodyne "reforms" will be promised, or a useless "administrative inquiry" will be undertaken; nobody who draws a tax-funded paycheck will be punished in any way; a tax-subsidized settlement will be reached, and business as usual will continue behind bars in Stark County.

And this means that, as surely as water will wet us, and as surely as fire will burn, other innocent people in Stark County will be abducted under color of authority, on the basis of entirely contrived charges, and suffer treatment similar to that received by Hope Steffey.

Of course, the experiences of Hope Steffey and the three anonymous teenage girls from Canton demonstrate that no hardware is needed to terrorize and traumatize people who shouldn't be behind bars to begin with - people who are completely innocent or charged with non-violent offenses.

And it's a certainty that somewhere, today, in this "free" country's prison population, the largest in the world - seven million people either behind bars, in prison, or on parole -- we could find plentiful examples of entirely harmless people who are being denigrated, abused, terrorized, and tortured in ways that would make Hope Steffey's experience look playful.

A brief postscript....

Several of my friends are employed as prison guards, or deputy sheriffs in charge of jail inmates. I attend church with one, correspond with others, receive regular friendly visits from a third, and respect all of them. The problem, obviously, is not that everyone who works for the prison-industrial complex is a depraved, sadistic lout; the problem is that the Regime -- through the idiotic fraud called the "war on drugs" and the criminalization of vices and behaviors that should not be crimes -- has created a prison population several times larger than it should be, and devised perverse profit incentives for economically depressed communities to go into the business of incarceration. If we build them -- prisons -- "they" will come, both inmates and guards, in such numbers that we will inevitably see an increase in the population of genuinely depraved "detention officers" and administrators.

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