I don’t think there’s much of a case for saying that we deliberately and gratuitously torture prisoners as an intentional part of their punishment, which was my point.
We have a fairly strong taboo to the effect that government should stop at the prisoner’s skin. However, there are a lot of ways of making people acutely miserable without breaking the taboo.
I don’t think it’s a bad taboo—it’s better than overtly mutilating people, I think.
Torture and Democracy is a history and analysis of no-marks torture, and concludes that no-marks torture is generally a result of monitoring by human rights groups.
Eh...
We have a fairly strong taboo to the effect that government should stop at the prisoner’s skin. However, there are a lot of ways of making people acutely miserable without breaking the taboo.
I don’t think it’s a bad taboo—it’s better than overtly mutilating people, I think.
Torture and Democracy is a history and analysis of no-marks torture, and concludes that no-marks torture is generally a result of monitoring by human rights groups.
I second Torture and Democracy’s analysis; it’s a great, if very long and very depressing, book.