The Hardin Saga: Waiting for the Punchline

(All Hardin photos by Scott Watson, except where noted.)


A lovely town, a nasty predicament: Thanks to the less-than-visionary "leadership" of its municipal government, the friendly residents of the beautiful town of Hardin, Montana are burdened with $27 million in debt for a huge, empty prison and a business deal with a shadowy mercenary group fronted by a convicted felon.


Hardin, Montana -- In his memoir Against All Hope, former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares tells the story of a Cuban ruler who built a huge prison, a structure several times larger than necessary to incarcerate the island's criminal population.


When he was chastised by an adviser for spending a considerable sum on a prison too big to use, the dictator smiled and replied: Don't worry, someday a ruler will come along who will fill it up.


The "someone" predicted by that ruler was Fidel Castro.


Just inside the city limits of Hardin, Montana (pop. 3,500), next to an IGA grocery store and not far from a sugar plant, there sits a huge, empty "jail" -- actually, a small prison -- that cost $27 million to construct. Driven to desperation as its construction bonds went into default, the city government, acting through its economic development arm, the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), offered last March to accept prisoners from the Gitmo detention camp.


Who's going to fill it up? The empty Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin, which became a minor tourist attraction last week.


That offer piqued the interest of some yet-unnamed people in California, who chartered a security pseudo-firm calling itself the American Police Force (APF).


The figurehead of that ersatz mercenary outfit is a diminutive Montenegrin Serb known by several aliases, most recently "Captain" Michael Hilton.


Although he originally claimed to have extensive military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Captain" Hilton -- a convicted felon and veteran scam artist -- eventually admitted that he had no military experience; this means he's a "captain" in roughly the same sense that Captain Crunch is worthy of the honorific.


Last summer Hardin's TRA reportedly entered into an agreement with APF to operate the jail for a fee of $2.6 million annually. TRA also promised to spend even larger sums to expand the detention center; they also announced plans to build an international training center for law enforcement and military personnel, as well as to construct housing for the personnel who would soon supposedly besiege the economically depressed town. The company also promised to provide a bounty of other civic assets, including a homeless shelter -- despite the fact that Hardin is a small town with no homeless population.


While discussions over management of the jail (more aptly called a prison) were going on, a second and possibly related process was nearing its conclusion.

Two views of "Captain" Hilton: Here he poses as head of the APF...

(Billings Gazette photo)


Since 1976, Hardin has had a contract with the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office (which is headquartered in the town) to provide law enforcement coverage.


In recent years, the sheriff's office has complained that the city government wasn't providing sufficient resources to provide services for Hardin while simultaneously covering a very large territory.


Accordingly, the city and sheriff's office have been negotiating a "deconsolidation" agreement, under which the contract with the sheriff's office would be terminated, and Hardin would provide its own police force.


... and here's the "Captain" in a 2003 booking photo taken by the Huntington Beach Police Department.

(Via the Billings Gazette.)


Just as the "deconsolidation" negotiations were nearly finished, "Captain" Hilton and another APF personality styling himself "Sergeant" Martin came rolling into town in two black Mercedes SUVs sporting magnetic decals advertising themselves as the "City of Hardin Police Department."


This naturally led to speculation, both locally and -- via the internet -- nationally and beyond, that the APF, a mercenary outfit led by an odd little man with a thick Slavic accent, was taking over law enforcement in Hardin.


In an interview with Pro Libertate, Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis -- a candid and thoroughly professional young man who arrived in Hardin about a year and a half ago -- pointed out that the APF had violated both the Montana State Code and state constitution by depicting themselves as Hardin's new police force.


Davis described the convergence of APF's arrival and the soon-to-be-completed deconsolidation talks as a "coincidence." "If Hardin wants to set up its own police force, and can find the resources to fund it," he said, "that's fine." The APF, however, obviously wasn't suitable for the job.


"If this outfit had been legitimate, the first thing they did when they came to town would have been to have a town meeting to introduce themselves, explain who they were and what they were going to do, and take questions," Davis observed. Instead, the group -- which, as far as anybody knows, includes only "Captain" Hilton and "Sergeant" Martin -- emitted a dense fog of extravagant promises while being cryptic and disingenuous in dealing with questions about its parent company, activities, personnel, assets, and qualifications, if any.


Interestingly, Undersheriff Davis described Hardin as a town with little-to-no violent crime. The most persistent problem, he pointed out, was dealing with people who have a bit too much to drink -- an assessment validated by a quick glance at the arrest reports published in the town's weekly newspaper, the Big Horn County News.


A welcome Throwback: He's a young man, but Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis is a candid, personable, low-key peace officer of the Old School. On the desk in front of him, incidentally, could be found materials provided to him by the Oath Keepers.


When he spoke with Pro Libertate, Davis was preparing for a Friday night during which he would provide backup for the single deputy assigned to patrol the entire county.

During a long walk late that evening in which I explored the length and breadth of the town, I saw nothing to indicate that there was a crime problem of any kind in Hardin.


The only sign of potential trouble I encountered was a small knot of visibly drunken young people -- several Indian youth from the local Crow Reservation in the company of a few local non-Indians -- outside a local convenience store. The "ringleader" of the group, a tall kid who appeared to be about 22 years old, reacted to the arrival of a stranger by offering me a friendly fist-bump.

What's up with this? Your correspondent at the entrance of the much-discussed Two Rivers Detention Facility.


During that nocturnal excursion, as well as a second one undertaken the following morning, I also failed to find any evidence that Hardin was being turned into a garrison state.


Contrary to reports given wide cyber-circulation, there was no portcullis being constructed at either end of the town.


Armed commandos said to be patrolling the streets failed to materialize. Nor was there any indication that people were being disarmed by foreign troops, or rounded up for incarceration and compelled injections of the legitimately dreadful H1N1 vaccine. As was the case with many others, the situation in Hardin came to my attention by way of an anonymous e-mail account that portrayed the town as an open-air prison quite similar to the totalitarian community described in Out of the Gray Zone, the terrific recent novel written by the estimable team of Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman.


My reaction, which I shared with those who listen to my weekday radio broadcast, was to suggest that there might be a nucleus of disturbing truth inside the accretions of alarmist speculation and apocalyptic embellishment. That much is certainly true, as I'll discuss anon.


I want to emphasize that some of the speculation was, up to a point, entirely justified, given the grandiose claims made by the APF and the clinically demented credulity of the Hardin municipal government:


Where did people get the idea that the group calling itself the "American Police Force" was going to be patrolling the mean street(s) of Hardin?


This idea came directly from the mouth of "Captain" Hilton himself.


As quoted in the September 17 Big Horn County News, Hilton (we'll use that surname for the sake of convenience) boasted of his group's purported manpower, assets, and experience in providing security for cruise ships, airliners, and convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Hilton then asserted that the group could draw on the services of "contractors" from around the world to provide Hardin with a security force. "Hardin will be the safest place in the United States to live, and in six months the best place to live," Hilton insisted.


If I may be forgiven for employing the cliche, Hilton was carrying coals to Newcastle: Hardin already is an exceptionally safe place to live, in large measure because that town, like most others in Montana, is populated by people who own and know how to use firearms.


Of particular interest in this connection is the fact that Hilton's proposal to use APF as a city police force was repeated at face value, and with considerable enthusiasm, by Jim Eshleman, a reporter and photographer for the Big Horn County News, in a September 24 column assailing APF's local critics and defending the organization's compulsive secrecy.


"Having spoken with a representative from the American Police Force I was told on a number of occasions that Hardin will be the safest town in the United States and in six months will be the best place to live in the United States," regurgitated Eshleman.


Besides, who could complain about turning over control of the town to a secretive, unaccountable paramilitary group as long as their checks clear?


"As far as I'm concerned, if a little secrecy means good, high-paying jobs and an economic boost to the city, then I say go for it," insisted Eshleman. "There is no reason to do anything that might put the project into jeopardy.... [I]n spite of the secrecy, it's in the best interests of the community that we partner with the American Police Force and work together for the economic good of not only Hardin, but of Big Horn County and the Crow Reservation."

Charming.


If Hardin were faced with the prospect of conquest by a sentient race of alien space ants, Eshleman would likely publish a column welcoming the town's new insect overlords and reminding them that, as a trusted local media personality, he could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.


Given that Hilton's claim was given wide circulation, and prominently endorsed by a local representative of the "respectable" media, it isn't surprising that rumors began to proliferate that Hardin was either preparing to give APF the run of the town, or that APF had already dispatched battle-hardened paramilitary operators to police the streets.


How did the notion arise that the APF had brought foreign troops to Hardin?


Again, the fons et origo of this rumor was none other than the illustrious "Captain" Hilton.


"APF is going to be bringing in high-level military and police to train," claimed Hilton, as reported in the September 24 Big Horn County News. "Twenty-five percent from America and seventy-five percent international top military leaders from around the world."


Also noteworthy was Hilton's bogus boast that APF had been "running international detention facilities since it was incorporated in 1984." This statement, though entirely false, probably contributed to speculation about foreign prison guards being imported to staff the Two Rivers Detention Facility. And that speculation was fortified by Hilton's claim that the cost of maintaining the military/police training facility would be paid either by "the international community ... or the U.S. government."


How on earth did people come to the conclusion that Hardin residents would be rounded up and compelled to undergo flu vaccinations?


An October 1 Associated Press report quoted Hilton as promising to "dispatch security to patrol Hardin's streets" and also that he had offered "free health care to city residents out of the jail's clinic." This seems to be the acorn that grew into a mighty oak of misinformation regarding round-ups of recalcitrant residents for compelled injections.


It's worth remembering that all of these claims were made at a time when the Hardin city government was talking about creating its own police force -- and the APF rolled into town advertising itself as the "City of Hardin Police Department." Add a large dose of impenetrable secrecy, stir lightly, and the result is a casserole of rumors and innuendo lightly seasoned with fact.


The Hardin city government fled the scene once media attention was focused on its deal with the Goniff Michael Hilton. When Pro Libertate visited Hardin municipal offices on October 2, we were told by a very nice woman working as a cashier at the utilities office that the City Council were in "meetings." If those meetings took place, they occurred somewhere other than City Hall, which was locked down tight at 3:28 PM on a Friday afternoon.


Mayor Ron Adams was nowhere to be found. Greg Smith, executive director of the TRA, and his wife, mayoral candidate Kerri Smith, had likewise disappeared.


"Captain" Hilton headed back to California on October 1, promising to return a few days later to preside over a "job fair."


Becky Shay, the former Billings Gazette reporter hired as a spokesperson for APF, likewise left town. The only people connected in any way to the APF or the prison with whom I was able to speak were two people hired to clean the facility. When I spoke with them just outside the prison's front gate they seemed eager to be finished with the job and anxious regarding the question of whether their check would clear.


During a press conference in Billings, after deflecting several questions and making the robustly implausible claim that APF "welcomed" a fraud investigation by the Montana Attorney General, Shay broke down in tears claiming that she feared that her life was imperiled -- not by the felon running the fraudulent company she was hired to front, but by that company's critics.


On Saturday morning (October 3), the Gazette reported that Allied Defense Systems, an authentic military contractor that had supposedly agreed to provide uniforms for APF prison guards, announced that it had sent a letter to Hilton threatening a lawsuit over the use of the company's name.


Maziar Mafi, the Santa Ana attorney who acted as "legal affairs director" for APF, was suspending his involvement with the group. This he did despite the fact that Michael Hilton generously conferred on Mafi the rank of "captain" in the APF, which appears to consist entirely of two "captains" and a "sergeant."


Mafi's sudden disenchantment with the group may have something to do with the fact that APF had missed the first payment on the black SUVs it had used to make its grand entrance into Hardin. Mafi was the one who had co-signed the loan to buy the vehicles. Becky Shay, who has already suffered a great deal in exchange for a promised $60,000 annual salary, an APF-provided black Mercedes SUV, and a new, APF-provided home, most likely will receive a visit from a repo man in the near future.


With Hilton's scam falling apart as quickly as a Ritz cracker in hydrogen peroxide, it's likely that Hardin's taxpayers will end up being fed some substantial portion of the $27 million in rotten bonds issued to pay for the construction of the Two Rivers prison. But somebody will end up owning that huge, empty prison.


This brings me to a couple of important questions that have yet to be answered. First, who provided the money behind Hilton's little con game? Second, what was Hilton or his sponsor going to get out of conning the Hardin city government?


The point of a con, of course, is to get something, rather than to give something. Hilton promised a great deal, but unless he received as-yet undisclosed cash payments or other blandishments from the TRA, it's difficult to see how he would profit from his deception. This wouldn't be the case, however, if he was working on behalf of somebody with an interest other than financial enrichment.


There remains a possibility that somebody acting with malign intentions wanted to acquire that prison -- and it's also possible that the same individual or group could run a more competent version of this scam in some other economically depressed town that turns to incarceration as a new source of revenue.


"We're just a big joke," complained a sad-eyed but sweet middle-aged waitress the morning of our departure from Hardin. No, it's your municipal government that's made itself look ludicrous, I insisted.


The chief unanswered question is this: If the APF affair is a joke, then what's the punchline? Who is going to fill up Hardin's empty prison?


For additional coverage of the Hardin controversy, go here for my first radio program on the subject, and here for my live report from Hardin. And watch for a video report that will be available soon.
___

(My sincere thanks to my good friend Scott Watson for his invaluable help on this story.)



Be sure to tune in weekdays from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.











Dum spiro, pugno!

The Torture State's Domestic Face

Caveat Lector: The following essay includes exceptionally disturbing video footage and one very offensive photograph. They are both indispensable to the story told below.

An additional note: Literally minutes after I posted this essay, the embedded videos of Hope Steffey's molestation were removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim by the television station that originally aired them. The video is still available here.

This sort of thing isn't supposed to happen -- at least not to attractive, middle-class, middle-aged American women.

We've become at least somewhat inured to the spectacle of sadistic violence being inflicted on dusky-skinned foreign terrorist suspects, or the occasional (make that “increasingly frequent”) violent death of black Americans, both young males and elderly women, as a result of paramilitary police raids.

Some of us have read the complaints of accused criminals who have been “lit up” by corrections officers in jails or brutalized in prison. And it's not difficult to find accounts of similar treatment inflicted on illegal aliens held in ICE detention facilities (the most notorious of which was built with the help of illegal immigrant labor, of course).

But, hey – the perps had it coming, right? And why should we be upset if some border-jumper gets roughed up a bit? After all, isn't that how things are done al otro lado de la frontera?

Hearts unmoved by such cases tend to melt at the spectacle of a slender, helpless woman shrieking in fear and impotent rage as she is pinned down and violently disrobed by skinheads wearing the uniform of Ohio's Stark County Sheriff's Department.

Don't get me wrong: The outrage over the sexual violation of Ohio resident Hope Steffey, who was arrested, assaulted by police, strip-searched, and left naked in a cell for six hours, is eminently justified.

In fact, I earnestly hope that there will be much more outrage, that it goes thermonuclear, and that its radiating consequences include not only criminal charges against the simians in uniform who violated Hope, but also a dramatic increase in public curiosity about the routine sadism, perversion, and abuse that typify America's prison-industrial complex.

It must be understood that what happened to Hope – who was arrested after suffering an assault and calling the police for help – is uncommon only in that the abuse she suffered was inflicted on an uncommonly telegenic and sympathetic victim. Fury over her experience in jail is coupled with outrage that this woman could begin the night as the victim of a private assault and end it as a victim of sexual molestation and battery under color of authority. And she was taken to jail on the flimsiest of pretexts, being arrested for resisting arrest – a tautological police tactic that is becoming increasingly common.

But what we have to remember is that Hope's evening from hell is not that unusual. In fact, her case isn't even unique for Ohio's Stark County jail system.

Last August, three teenage girls from Canton, Ohio filed suit against the Multi-County Juvenile Attention Center after a “scared straight” experience turned into a festival of sexual assault and humiliation.

In April of last year, the girls were charged with “criminal trespass on a public sidewalk” -- a charge as contrived as an arrest for resisting arrest – as a result of a fight that involved several other teenagers. The girls insist that they were innocent bystanders, a predictable claim that has the merit of being legally true: Rather than going to court, the girls agreed to perform 20 hours of “community service,” attend school dutifully, and take a 15-minute “walk-through” of the juvenile “Attention Center.”

According to the lawsuit, within minutes of their arrival at the juvenile jail, a “youth leader” -- that is, a guard – began to scream at them. When the girls reacted by giggling, a predictable adolescent reaction to tension, the tax-engorged cretin assaulted them, throwing them against the wall face-first while continuing to scream at them.

Led to the second floor of the facility, the girls were subjected to crude and denigrating sexual remarks. One guard – who should be fitted for a millstone (these are 13-year-old girls we're talking about) or at least beaten into jelly by the male relatives of his victims – made remarks about the girls' breasts. Another insinuated that one of the girls was a lesbian and displayed his unique charm by cracking a funny about that reliable comic staple, prison rape: “[The] other female inmates will love you because they love blondes.”

Female guards then took the girls individually into a room where each of them was forced to strip and undergo a body cavity examination – while the male guards prowled just outside the doorway making derisive remarks. The girls were then forced to put on filthy jail attire – including unlaundered intimate wear. About a half-hour later they were given 30 seconds to change their clothes under the threat of staying in the jail overnight.

The girls then fled. The guards went back to “work” until their shifts ended and they could go back to surfing the 'Net for child porn, or whatever it is that skeevy, mouth-breathing degenerates of this sort do when they're not on the clock.

When the parents complained to the court about the sexual violation and physical battery endured by their daughters, Court Administrator Richard DeHeer parried the complaint by replying...

... let's all say it together ...

... that the juvenile jail staff “acted within its protocol.”

This was essentially the same reaction Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson offered when the strip-search and sexual violation of Hope Steffey hit the local news.

First of all, insisted Swanson, his deputies acted in accordance with established policies – despite the fact that the Department's guidelines do not permit male deputies to be present when a female is being subjected to a strip search. Well, ah, y'see, what was done to Steffey wasn't a strip search, Swanson continued.

This leaves to the imagination of those unusually gifted in the art of conjuring euphemisms to devise a more suitable way of describing a procedure that involved tearing the clothes and undergarments from a terrified, resisting woman, leaving her, you know, naked and forcing her to swaddle herself in toilet paper to provide some scintilla of modesty, since she was still very much within eyeshot of the tonsured steroid junkies who had held her down and torn off her clothes.

Hope and her husband have likewise filed suit. And, like the lawsuit filed on behalf of the three teenage girls from Canton, Hope's complaint will never go to court. Some anodyne “reforms” will be promised, or a useless “administrative inquiry” will be undertaken; nobody who draws a tax-funded paycheck will be punished in any way; a tax-subsidized settlement will be reached, and business as usual will continue behind bars in Stark County.

And this means that, as surely as water will wet us, and as surely as fire will burn, other innocent people in Stark County will be abducted under color of authority, on the basis of entirely contrived charges, and suffer treatment similar to that received by Hope Steffey.

The real source of outrage here is that things could have been so much worse for Hope. Yes, she could have been forced to “ride the Taser,” had the arresting officer been interested in giving her a brief taste of electrocution torture. But in many jurisdictions, an arrestee who struggled as Hope did to preserve her personal dignity may have been confined in a bizarre retro-medievalist apparatus called a “restraint chair.”

Restraint chairs come in various styles, colors, and brand names, but the design and function are consistent: The device binds an inmate in such a way that he or she cannot move the arms, legs, or torso.

Purportedly created for the sole purpose of restraining violent and dangerous inmates to prevent them from injuring themselves or others, restraint chairs have been used for punishment, despite explicit warnings from manufacturers. The result has been a growing number of incidents in which prisoners – including non-violent offenders and arrestees yet to be convicted of any offense – have been abused, maimed, crippled, tortured, and killed.

Writing in the April 2000 issue of The Progressive* (obviously a left-leaning journal, but one of the few publications that takes the Bill of Rights seriously), Ann-Marie Cusac recites a list of restraint chair abuses that have been documented in lawsuits and official investigations:

*the devices have been used “for punishment of nonviolent behavior”; for instance, protesters arrested on disorderly conduct charges have been confined in the chair for passive resistance to orders from guards, or for demanding to speak to lawyers;

*children have been “strapped into the chairs for nonviolent behaviors”: Dan Corcoran, president of a Beaverton, Oregon firm that manufactures the chairs, reported under oath that his biggest clients included juvenile detention systems in Georgia and Florida;

*“nude inmates and detainees have been strapped into restraint chairs”;


*some prisoners have been confined to the chairs for as long as eight days;


*other prisoners have been “hooded, pepper-gassed, beaten, or threatened with electrocution” while shackled to the chairs – treatment we'd now associate with the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (that is, torture) used against foreign terrorist suspects.


*as of 2000, at least eleven people died while confined in restraint chairs, often from positional asphyxia, blood clots, or cardiac arrest. Several of those episodes involved inmates or arrestees with documented and treatable mental illness.

No, this isn't a scene from a movie: A prisoner in a Maine"Supermax" facility is bound naked to a restraint chair.

A little more than a decade ago, tax-feeding thugs in the employ of Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office confined Richard Post, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, to a restraint chair. Post, who became a competitive wheelchair athlete after the 1985 car accident that crippled his legs, had been arrested for possessing a gram of marijuana.

While in the holding cell, Post tried to explain that he needed an internal catheter in order to urinate; this is an important medical necessity for a paraplegic, and one that could have been accommodated with little difficulty. But Post was in the custody of a department headed by Joe Arpaio, a waddling sack of corrupt ego who uses the calculated abuse of detainees to cultivate an image as “America's toughest sheriff.” The chair-moisteners employed by Arpaio weren't interested in helping Post, so the desperate man started to rattle his cage and flush the toilet in protest.

That was not dangerous behavior, however annoying it might have been. Yet several of Arpaio's heroes seized the helpless paraplegic and confined him in a restraint chair, cinching down the straps with such force that they broke his neck. Already deprived of his legs, Post lost the use of his hands. He sued the County – one of many to do so as a result of criminal abuse or the death of a loved one at the hands of Arpaio's trained simians -- and received an $800,000 settlement.

In 1999, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department paid out $755,000 to dismiss a class-action suit over the use of restraint chairs as punishment. Among the plaintiffs in the suit was Katherine Martin, a 106-pound woman with a heart condition who was confined to a chair for eight and a half hours after allegedly touching a guard. The restraints were pulled so tight that skin was permanently abraded from Katherine's back and shoulders, and she suffered lasting nerve damage. As is often the case when detainees are confined in the chair for long periods, Katherine was denied access to a bathroom and spent hours sitting in her own waste.

The charge against Katherine that led to this treatment was “suspicion of public drunkenness.”

Ronald Motz, another plaintiff in the Sacramento lawsuit, was also arrested for public drunkenness. A videotaped record shows Motz pleading for a chance to call his attorney, only to be told by a guard that “the phone doesn't work.” After a gap in the tape, Motz is shown being strapped down in a chair with a spit mask around his face.

“I just want to call my attorney,” he protests.

“You don't get to call an attorney,” snaps a guard, who informs him that he was “going to be released in about five hours. Now you're not.”

“What did I do wrong – ask for my attorney?” Motz asks plaintively.

“You weren't following directions,” the guard replies.

The Sacramento video record also shows the March 1999 detention of a woman named Gena Domogio, who was strapped in a chair after being thrown to the floor by several guards who knelt on her back and wrapped her face in a towel. As she is bound into the chair she can be heard protesting that she had a thyroid problem and couldn't breathe. Kimberly Bird, another Sacramento detainee, was taken to the hospital after being rendered unconscious in the chair. The video record shows her pleading, “I'm going to die. Don't let me die.”

As a result of lawsuits in Phoenix, Sacramento, Utah, and elsewhere, the use of restraint chairs has tapered off somewhat in recent years, at least domestically. Oh, they're still in use, of course: The Sacramento Sheriff's Department, for instance, faces another potential lawsuit over using the chair as a punish-and-torture mechanism. But the lawsuits of a decade ago apparently caused at least some agencies to lose some of their enthusiasm for the device.

A burgeoning overseas market: An insurgent or terrorist suspect is held in a restraint chair by US military forces.

While markets for the device have been hard to find in Europe and in most of the English-speaking world, Corcoran (who was deposed in the Sacramento lawsuit) was able to unload large part of his inventory in such havens of liberty and human dignity as the United Arab Emirates. Since “interrogating prisoners” is one of the advertised functions of the chairs, Corcoran probably found a good customer in the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.

Of course, the experiences of Hope Steffey and the three anonymous teenage girls from Canton demonstrate that no hardware is needed to terrorize and traumatize people who shouldn't be behind bars to begin with – people who are completely innocent or charged with non-violent offenses. And it's a certainty that somewhere, today, in this “free” country's prison population, the largest in the world – seven million people either behind bars, in prison, or on parole -- we could find plentiful examples of entirely harmless people who are being denigrated, abused, terrorized, and tortured in ways that would make Hope Steffey's experience look playful.

A brief postscript....

Several of my friends are employed as prison guards, or deputy sheriffs in charge of jail inmates. I attend church with one, correspond with others, receive regular friendly visits from a third, and respect all of them. The problem, obviously, is not that everyone who works for the prison-industrial complex is a depraved, sadistic lout; the problem is that the Regime -- through the idiotic fraud called the "war on drugs" and the criminalization of vices and behaviors that should not be crimes -- has created a prison population several times larger than it should be, and devised perverse profit incentives for economically depressed communities to go into the business of incarceration. If we build them -- prisons -- "they" will come, both inmates and guards, in such numbers that we will inevitably see an increase in the population of genuinely depraved "detention officers" and administrators.

*The Progressive is published in Madison, Wisconsin; the magazine that once employed me is published in Appleton, a couple of hours north of that city. On a few occasions I ran into reporters from that journal and found that -- our ideological disagreements notwithstanding -- we shared many of the same concerns about the emerging Homeland Security State.

A reminder: My book Liberty in Eclipse: The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State is now available.

Dum spiro, pugno!