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The Bush Legacy of Mass Imprisonment in the War on Terror

By Jonathan Simor

Prisons are usually a domestic policy issue, and one that candidates from both parties have been enthusiastically "for" over the last several decades. George W. Bush changed that when he took the war on crime strategy of mass incarceration and deployed it in his war on terrorism. His administration's grotesque interrogation and torture policies then exposed these prisons to catastrophically bad publicity undermining US prestige and security.As Tim Golden's reporting in the NYTimes today about the US prison at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan suggests, the real problems with the strategy are more fundamental than those much denounced examples of inquisitorial excess. Mass imprisonment (or incarceration) involves sweeping up and incapacitating large numbers of subjects who are considered dangerous without much effort to discriminate among them...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 07, 2008 (boomark / email).