{"id":8835,"date":"2013-06-17T07:37:56","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T11:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=8835"},"modified":"2013-06-17T07:37:56","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T11:37:56","slug":"the-architecture-of-a-different-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/06\/17\/the-architecture-of-a-different-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The architecture of a different America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Camp_x-ray_detainees\"<\/a>More than a decade ago, when prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq began arriving at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I remember thinking, “We already know how to do this.”<\/p>\n

The clumsy thought flashing through my mind was that America’s government already had the infrastructure, the ideas, the personnel and the contingency plans — heck we even had the weird orange jump suits — to process these so-called “detainees.”<\/p>\n

And of course we did.<\/p>\n

Over the last forty years, the United States has evolved into the society that imprisons more of our own citizens than any other nation on earth — by a long shot.<\/p>\n

Though incarceration rates have dipped slightly, we still keep more than 2 million of our citizens behind bars, many of them for non-violent crimes that at one time in our history would have been considered medical problems, or mental health issues.<\/p>\n

Set aside for a moment the justice of mass-incarceration.<\/p>\n

Whatever you think about the spread of prisons in America — including the nearly twenty local, state and Federal jails and prisons here in the North Country — the reality is that they represent a new kind of architecture.<\/p>\n

It is literally the architecture of a different America.<\/p>\n

It is an America where we have the capacity, at any given time, to process and incarcerate millions of people.\u00a0 The system is efficient, scalable and like all well-made tools, it sits on the shelf waiting to be used.<\/p>\n

Since 9\/11, another parallel architecture has been erected — or at least expanded — with astonishing speed.<\/p>\n

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” reported the Washington Post’s Dana Priest in 2010.<\/p>\n

We now have more than a million Americans working as prison guards and corrections officers in the US, but we also — according to Priest’s reporting — have more than 850,000 Americans working in intelligence, with some level of top-secret security clearance.<\/p>\n

We now know that at least a significant number of those people are working to monitor and keep tabs on our behavior, collecting our private phone data and surveilling peaceful political groups, including the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.<\/p>\n

We know that law enforcement and security agencies are operating unmanned drones over our communities, a well as in the skies above Pakistan and Somalia.<\/p>\n

We also know that our government has pushed to the outer limits what it views as legal and acceptable measures, including interrogation practices once viewed as torture, and the assassination of American citizens without trial or due process.<\/p>\n

Let me say bluntly that I think these systems were designed and built with the best of intentions.\u00a0 Protecting America from lawlessness and terror is a noble pursuit.<\/p>\n

But it is worth taking stock of the fact that this vast architecture now exists and holds enormous potential for misuse.\u00a0 We now have the capacity to watch, monitor, detain, incarcerate, interrogate and even kill with great skill and efficiency.<\/p>\n

Is it conceivable that those powers could fall into the wrong hands or be used to the wrong ends?<\/p>\n

It’s also worth asking, I think, what happens when so many of us now work as soldiers, intelligence operatives, Homeland Security agents, or prison guards.<\/p>\n

Are we changed as a people if so many of us are in the business of prison, surveillance and war?\u00a0 At what point, does the architecture of the new America begin to seem normal, quotidien and beyond questioning?<\/p>\n

As always, your comments and ideas welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than a decade ago, when prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq began arriving at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8838,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8835\/revisions\/8838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}