TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
structures” (the old blue print for Kennedy’s war on poverty) we have: the RICO Act, local gang ordinances, sentence enhancements, restrictions of movement and employment post-inmate release and zero tolerance here and “mano dura” there, all with the aim of eradicating the gang member now positioned on the global street corner. In effect, our anti-gang measures have become a form of ideology now exported internationally as part of the global crime control industry. This discovery of the gang member threat enables a shift in the “culture of punishment” which also includes torture and is easily complemented by the hyper-surveillance as seen through the National Security Agency revelations. We should be reminded that according to the FBI the number one organized crime group in the USA is the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, a product of Reagan’s Cold War in Central America as tens of thousands of Central Americans were displaced with the youth struggling to find a foot hold in the inter-ethnic conflict zones of Los Angeles. Where do we see the legal hysteria most clearly displayed, championed and employed today? Not only is it in every facet of the Patriot Act but it is probably more widely enacted in the “Secure Communities” program which neatly envisions and justifies the U.S. state, particularly the humungous branch called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, busily deporting all those “criminal aliens” (roughly half of the 400,000 plus “aliens” deported each year are said to be “criminal” with purported gang members targeted under a sub program called Operation Community Shield ) as we separate the good immigrant from the bad one. To grasp the vastness of the program, Secure Communities has grown from 14 jurisdictions in 2008 to over 3,000 today with many local police agencies working alongside ICE’s 20,000 employees - making it the largest law enforcement agency in the United States
VOLUME 02 NUMBER 02 & 03
with a budget of $6 billion annually! As we know, a lot can be done in the name of state security, especially when the Constitution only offers its protection to citizens, leaving the 4th Amendment on Unreasonable Search and Seizure as something discretionary. The New York Times recently pointed this out as news of a successful class action law suit against ICE was announced: “In a series of raids in suburban New York in 2006 and 2007, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement burst into private homes in the dead of night, without warrants, looking for undocumented immigrants, often in the wrong houses. They pounded on doors, terrorized innocent residents, ineptly drew guns on police officers who were supposed to be their partners, and found hardly any of the gang members they were hunting. It was a stunning display of aggression and incompetence. “ (New York Times Editorial Board, April 8, 2013 “When ICE Ran Amok”). What do we make of all this? The emergence and treatment of the gang member is intrinsically tied to the treatment of the poor and the disenfranchised. Gang members are symptoms, barometers of a social climate that is increasingly Hobbesian in outlook and exploitative in nature. Humiliation, confinement, social exclusion, stigmatization, segregation and finally torture are now common practices and no amount of paeans to human rights discourses and protocols can distract us from the social fact that every day in our prisons thousands of inmates are placed in dehumanizing isolation cells, beaten and psychologically maltreated due to their purported dangerous subcultural associations. The inmate hunger strikers in California, many of whom are protesting extraordinary levels of isolated detention for being gang members have
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