Thank you Taser, for the truth
This being Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on things for which we can be thankful.
We can be thankful for an unexpected bit of news from Taser International. At long last, the company admits that deaths can result from the use of what many consider an instrument of torture. Taser says police should no longer aim the Taser charge at the heart or the chest.
The RCMP picked up on this immediately. The force sent out orders to its detachments to revise their guidelines, and to provide their personnel with new training.
The story, with a link toTaser International, is here.
In a statement, Taser soft-pedals the danger of its weapon. Taser suggests its new “taser targeting guide” is meant to “avoid the controversy” about whether the deaths that have followed use of the weapon are a direct result, or merely coincidental.
Hopefully, the admission by Taser will sufficiently curb use of the stun gun that we will see no repetition of the deaths that have occurred across Canada when police deployed the instrument.
It’s unfortunate that Canada’s been infected with this made-in-USA device. There’s a direct parallel that can be drawn between such weapons and the American propensity to violence and cruelty in carrying out law enforcement.
Cruelty in law enforcement receives a much-needed airing in Cruel and Unusual: the Culture of Punishment in America, by Anne-Marie Cusac (Yale University Press).
Cusac, an assistant professor at Roosevelt University, provides both a historical overview and a cutting present-day analysis of the practices into which the United States has fallen in dealing with people who present a perceived threat.
Cusak demonstrates how the dramatic increase in the use of torture and restraint has done little if anything to curb crime rates or reduce terrorist threats at home and abroad.
Ms. Cusac links how this climate of punishment has infected American culture, ranging from religious beliefs to TV programming, child-rearing practices and politics.
Perhaps this helps to explain why the American public seems to be so forgiving of torture practices at Abugraib and Guantanamo, or the fact that America’s imprisonment rate has multiplied five-fold in the past forty years.
Why this puritanical insistence of extreme punishment — the long prison terms imposed for minor infractions such as marijuana use, or the way in which police flaunt the use of handcuffs and leg irons in transporting non-violent prisoners to and from court?
Do these practices arise from a fundamentally insecure society, one overwhelmed by change and unable to cope with the pressure of modern society?
Ms. Cusac observes that early in its history, the United States repudiated Old World cruelty toward criminals and moved toward rehabilitation along with punishment. This philosophy, she says, has now been abandoned.
A book like Cruel and Unusual should cause Canadians to hesitate in contemplating the so-called anti-crime measures being proposed by the Harper government. To often, such measures are not only unnecessarily retributive, but likely to put society in more, not less danger.
An example: The bill rejected by the Liberal-dominated Senate would have forced some prisoners to serve their full sentences, rather than be released early under mandatory supervision.
“Let them do their time,” the hardliners say. But these people are going to get out eventually anyway. Isn’t it better to manage their return to society, rather than dump them loose with no control or supervision?
A NOTE ON CANADIAN THANKSGIVING. I was intrigued to find out recently that Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on the first Thursday in November until after the First World War. It was then moved up to the second Monday in Octoberso that it wouldn’t conflict with what was first called Armistice Day, and is now Remembrance Day, on the 11th of November.
