From Badger Blues:
No, that’s not a quote from some conservative who thinks our public infrastructure constitutes a “tax hell”. It’s from a Circuit Court ruling about Eighth Amendment violations in Wisconsin’s Supermax prison:In a stinging 14-page decision, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals questioned whether the treatment of inmates at the Boscobel prison violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.Some conservatives, upon seeing a file photo of a different part of the prison, decided that the photograph was prima facie evidence against any sort of barbarism or cruelty. See no evil, hear no evil.
Writing for the three-judge panel, Judge Terence Evans described that treatment in the starkest terms.
“Stripped naked in a small prison cell with nothing except a toilet; forced to sleep on a concrete floor or slab; denied any human contact; fed nothing but ‘nutri-loaf;’ and given just a modicum of toilet papers - four squares - only a few times. Although this might sound like a stay at a Soviet gulag in the 1930s, it is, according to the claims in this case, Wisconsin in 2002,” Evans wrote in the opening paragraph of his decision.
The court did not rule on the facts of the case, sending that portion back to be decided by a federal district court in Green Bay. But the judges said that if those facts are true, then the prison violated inmate Nathan Gillis’ rights.
Do conservatives really think being stripped naked and forced to wallow in your own feces is a just and legitimate punishment worthy of a liberal democracy? Or do they merely view inmates as somehow less than human, deserving no rights, having no expectation of common decency, and accorded no protections under their Constitution?
If you have to lock some people up for the rest of their lives (and such is an unfortunate fact of life in a civilized society), it costs you nothing to be polite.
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