[Warning: see Jim’s comment below for some judicious thinking–which was pretty much lacking in my post.]

I’ve mentioned before how much a liked Season One of Prison Break. I thought of this while reading the third installment of Doug Wilson’s reply to Sam Harris. According to Wilson, Harris makes a great deal of the moral superiority of the modern West over every other time and place because we have allegedly recognized that slavery is evil.

What Doug points out is that virtually all the slavery mentioned in Harris’ chosen texts (unlike the slavery of the American South) is a penalty for some kind of crime, usually a property crime in which the perpetrator has a liability that exceeds his present value. In other words, slavery (which was often a temporary situation) was simply the Israelite alternative to serving prison with hard labor.

In fact, it is quite possible that the main difference between ancient slavery and modern, is that the modern is much more severe:

we are not dealing with two million murderers, rapists, or violent offenders. Quite a few of these inhabitants of these secularist kennels of yours were idiot teenagers with a bag of pot, and they were sent off to these graduate schools of crime and vice from courtrooms that were as secular as anything someone like you could desire. These are courtrooms where if an attorney were to quote the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule with any kind of approval, the judge would wet his pants. You told us that this was an easy moral question. Why haven’t we solved it yet? Why does the United States house two million slaves? That is twice the population of the state I live in. Given this, your easy dismissal of biblical ethics is just that, far too easy. “Anyone who believes the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality” (p. 14).

This is where Prison Break comes in. While that show has, as all fiction does, a great many fantastically impossible situations, the horrors of prison life are, if anything, understated. And what this means is that describing prison as a “kennel” is rather tame. Prisons are places where men are sent to be raped and brutalized and killed in many other ways by worse men. Not only do we all know this, but it is not a rare thing to find a prosecutor speaking positively about prison because this is included in the punishment (i.e. how it is a deterrent to “white collar crime”).

I’m not going to spend a great deal of time or energy arguing for what everyone reading this already knows quite well: On God’s long list headed, “Why I hate the U.S.,” the prison system is near the top–probably even above the US Army-produced sex trade (our main contribution to the economies in some regions) and close with abortion. We all know it is evil. We all know it causes unspeakable harm to people every day. And we don’t care. No Christian candidate would ever get anywhere advocating getting rid of prisons. At best, any kind of prison reform other than building more of them would do nothing to help his campaign. More probably it would destroy his chances in the primary.

We simply don’t think the ongoing torture matters. Those people are convicts no matter how innocuous their crimes. They don’t matter. So screw them. Literally.

What sort of mental block is going on that we simply continue this hell-on-earth day after day decade after decade? One insight I think is found in Albert Jay Nock’s, “Anarchist’s Progress”:

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it – the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers – felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect – nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

But sooner of later this ceases to be a delusion and becomes a self-conscious evasion. Do we not hold members of other societies responsible for their atrocities? How long can we do this and remain dedicated to Not Thinking About It when the elephant in the room is sitting on our laps? Sooner or later, as we have TV shows and movies all portray rather tame versions of what goes on in bloody real life, and as we find officials admitting and using to their advantage the horror, it has to occur to us that this, this is Something We Are Not Supposed to Let Happen.

And yet where are we to go to start acting like civilized human beings again? Are not our politicians constantly promising to extend the scope of this man-made hell? When being tough on crime means swift justice, it is a good shtick and worth voting for. But it hasn’t mean that for a long time. It means hardening criminals, training them, and adding to the number of rapes occurring on public property.

Sounds like an odd thing for the God-and-country club to assume the moral high ground for.