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Chapter 4 Guantánamo Bay As he was being reassigned from the detention center at Guantánamo Bay (GITMO in Pentagon parlance), the former warden Mike Bumgarner was blamed for the suicides resulting from his attempted institutional reforms that loosened the restrictions on prisoners. He reflected on this tour of duty:“We tried to improve their lives to the extent that we can—to the point that we may have gone overboard, not recognizing the real nature of who we’re dealing with,” he said.“I thought they had proven themselves. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not think that they would kill themselves” (Golden 2006a, EV16). The experiment to reform Guantánamo Bay had failed, giving way to a more coercive penal discourse. Shifts in that direction were evident in December 2006 with the opening of Camp 6, a new $30 million facility modeled after a county jail in southern Michigan. GITMO has certainly tightened up, moving three-fourths of the 400 prisoners into maximum security cells. Commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., said hardened measures reflected the changing nature of the prison population and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men: “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants. I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist” (Golden 2006b, EV2). Still, military planners contend that GITMO is drifting away from interrogations toward the long-term (or indefinite) detention of men who, for the most part, would never be charged with any crime (Amann 2004). Introduction In the wake of 9/11, GITMO has emerged as a unique and highly controversial experiment, prompting a penological question: what kind of prison is it exactly?While attempting to prepare a response to that question, it is useful to turn to an area of theoretical criminology that draws on critical perspectives .In Power,Discourse and Resistance:A Genealogy of the Strangeways Prison Riot, Eamonn Carrabine offers a valuable template for understanding the manifold purposes of incarceration. Moreover, he sheds light on the relevance of discourse, a term that points to “a system of thought that informs practice. It refers to both a framework of belief and a guide for appropriate conduct.As 47 such the various discourses serve to ‘incorporate’ the agencies of the powerful within the project of imprisonment” (2004, 38; see also Bosworth 1999; Bosworth and Carrabine 2001; Carrabine 2000). Much like the work of Carrabine and a host of critical sociologists, this project is influenced by Michel Foucault’s (1977) writings on prison, and at an even deeper level by Friedrich Nietzsche (1996 [1887]) whose genealogical method skeptically investigates all phenomena for their signs, symbols, and meaning of power (see Adler and Longhurst 1994; Garland 1990). In brief, Foucault (1977) points to two modes of exercising power over individuals that are now apparent at GITMO.The first modality relies on the imposition of negative gestures including rejection, banishment, and exile, particularly as they manifest in long-term imprisonment and indefinite detention. In the second, power is demonstrated through the pursuit of instituting perfect order by way of meticulous classification and control, notably in the social sorting of prisoners and unlawful enemy combatants (see Cousins and Hussain 1984, 189).To illustrate how those modes of power shape penal technologies, Foucault goes to great lengths to decipher the function and meaning of the panopticon, Bentham’s classic cylinder prison design. Nowadays, virtually all supermax prisons are panoptic because, even though they do not conform to a circular architecture, the wide use of surveillance cameras serves what Foucault describes as a “principle that power should be visible and unverifiable ” (1977, 201).1 While the panopticon, or “utopian vision machine,” has become a model and metaphor for clarifying the role of surveillance in a highly technological society, it is at the sharp end of the panoptic spectrum where its power is most extreme (Lyon 2006; Virilio 1994). Indeed, the growing literature on supermax prisons reflects Foucault’s fascination with institutionalization and the demand for control (King 1999; Miller 2007; L. Rhodes 2004;Ward and Werlich 2003). Attempting to know fully the internal workings at GITMO, however, poses a problem because it is for the most part an institution that remains inaccessible except for highly monitored visits by select members of the media, civilian and military attorneys, and human rights organizations (Amnesty International 2005;Conover 2003;Human RightsWatch 2004,2005).Despite numerous...

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