Perverse Justice and the Securitarian Position

Lindsay Beyerstein, who blogs at Majikthise, has an In These Times article on the destructive use of solitary confinement in the Jose Padilla case, and by extension, elsewhere. Read it; here's the punch line: "it seems perverse that the government could deliberately undermine Padilla’s will to defend himself and treat him as competent to stand trial on those very charges."

On the thread about the article on her home blog, the resident securitarian, "Phantom," first tried to derail the thread with a completely bogus implicit claim that Beyerstein was asking for our "sympathy" for the person, Jose Padilla, rather than talking about legal precedent. He finally dropped that line after being hammered for it repeatedly, but then decided to use the classic securitarian trope "the first duty of a state is to protect its citizens." 

In replying to him, I said that he was completely wrong in applying this supposed truism to our republic. The first duty of those serving in the American government is to protect and uphold the US Constitution, whose prime principles are liberty and equality.

I concluded with a little pop quiz, asking him to identify who said the following:

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis–that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.

Any guesses from my readers? It shouldn't be too hard to google!

Comments

[Chris]

It's from one of judges on the Supreme Court. Is it Thomas?

[John Protevi]

Close, but not exactly.

[hartmann]

it's scalia in the hamdi case.

[John Protevi]

We have a winner! Hartmann wins the grand prize of my hearty congratulations!

[Jon Cogburn]

I realize that it is irrelevant to the point, but I do sympathize with any pack animal, human or otherwise, kept to itself. If you've ever had the misfortune to live next to somebody that thinks of a dog as just a burglar alarm and who as a result leaves it alone in the yard to just be crazy all its life, then you have some idea of the hell that most human beings go through when placed in solitary confinement. The psych literature in both cases makes it clear that the punishment is intolerably cruel (and in supermax prisons they often leave the lights on all the time too). Unfortunately, in a decision that involved uniquely bad linguistics, the supreme court a decade ago decided that the constitution didn't prohibit hideous cruelty as long as such cruelty was not unusual.

It still weirds me out that regular attendance at Christian churches in the United States seems to be correlated with likelihood of being such a vicious retributivist about punishment. It shouldn't though; in fact, the sadism is so much worse than the inconsistency that I shouldn't think about it too much.

[Thomas McDonald]

Just discovered your blog and some of your papers online John. Not only this construction - "Perverse Justice and the Securitarian Position" - but in your writing in general I see an excellent American translation-dissemination (in the creative sense of the terms) of Deleuze. Considering how difficult this is in all the efforts to introduce Deleuze through English I must highly commend you. Great work.

[John Protevi]

Jon, it's not really that much OT, as you note the context of social animals. Isolation is destructive on many levels to social animals and the dog example is very much relevant. About Christianity and retribution, that's the thing with Christianity: it's so big and historically diverse you can get all sorts of strands in there. There's no essence; you have to do genealogical work. How did many American churches become retributionist? That's a very good question!

Thomas, thanks for the kind words. It's no secret Deleuze is a big influence on me, though I'm not sure this particular post is all that Deleuzean. Anyway, just had a look at your site. Very nice graphics work! Do you think Deleuze has influenced your graphics work? The reason I ask is that I'm going to give a workshop in the Arts program at Goldsmiths College in London in December and I've got to prepare! Feel free to email me if you don't want to post a comment.

[Jon Cogburn]

For even one of them to be retributivist is pretty weird given the Gospels. I mean, I think an alien anthropologist wouldn't get it. Jesus stopped a stoning and then later gets lynched himself, on the way to his death he blesses one of the guys on the cross. All the stuff about turning the other cheek and loving your enemy fits pretty badly with retributivism too (although C.S. Lewis actually makes some interesting arguments about the death penalty here).

This whole thing is interesting to me, because the priest in our Unitarian Church up here is also chaplain at a maximum security penitentiary.

Yeah, I find your Deleuze notes to be a really good model for how teaching, research, and being a good student of a great philosopher should intersect. I've shown some people up here and we all kind of hope that we can do something similar vis a vis the difficult philosophers we love. It's even more amazing how good your resources are, given that stuff like that doesn't count for promotion hardly at all.