by Eyal Press
The most effective way to help people overcome moral injury is to communalize it, Jonathan Shay argued in Achilles in Vietnam, providing veterans with an opportunity to share their experiences with the public. Medical professionals who risked sustaining such injuries during the coronavirus pandemic were accorded such opportunities from a public that felt indebted to them and that listened to their stories with respect and curiosity. Dirty workers like Harriet were not. As a consequence, the reckoning she engaged in was a private one, unspooling in haunting memories that she had to wrestle with alone. Missing was a parallel public reckoning, the kind of communal exercise I’d watched unfold at the VA hospital in Philadelphia, where people gathered to hear veterans talk about the moral transgressions they had committed in the course of fighting America’s recent wars. Then the audience members spoke, delivering a message all dirty workers deserved to hear. “We sent you into harm’s way,” they chanted in unison. “We put you into situations where atrocities were possible. We share responsibility with you: for all that you have seen; for all that you have done; for all that you have failed to do.”
Notes
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Epigraph
The powerless must do their own dirty work”: James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 94.
Introduction
“There was always at least one roof”: Everett C. Hughes Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. All of Hughes’s quotations in the introduction come from these papers unless otherwise indicated.
“I am ashamed for my people”: Everett Hughes, “Good People and Dirty Work,” Social Problems 10, no. 1 (Summer 1962): 5.
“Having dissociated himself clearly”: Ibid., 7.
“the most colossal and dramatic”: Ibid., 3.
“The question concerns what is done”: Ibid., 8.
“the moral burdens and the emotional hardships”: Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 76.
“None of us will ever be the same”: Helen Ouyang, “I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York,” New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2020.
“Dirtiness of any kind”: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 46.
“The distasteful is removed behind the scenes”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 121.
1. Dual Loyalties
“deliberate indifference”: Thurgood Marshall, Estelle v. Gamble, Nov. 30, 1976, casetext.com/case/estelle-v-gamble.
“naked humans herded like cattle”: Lisa Davis et al., “Deinstitutionalization? Where Have All the People Gone?,” Current Psychiatry Reports 14, no. 3 (2012): 260.
“cold mercy of custodial care”: Vic Digravio, “The Last Bill JFK Signed—and the Mental Health Work Still Undone,” WBUR, Oct. 23, 2013, www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2013/10/23/community-mental-health-kennedy.
“No other affluent country”: Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 39.
“to report this activity”: Fred Cohen, “The Correctional Psychiatrist’s Obligation to Report Patient Abuse: A Dialogue,” Correctional Mental Health Report, Jan./Feb. 2014, 67.
“that their ethics”: Sarah Glowa-Kollisch et al., “Data-Driven Human Rights: Using Dual Loyalty Trainings to Promote the Care of Vulnerable Patients in Jail,” Health and Human Rights Journal, June 11, 2015, www.hhrjournal.org/2015/03/data-driven-human-rights-using-dual-loyalty-trainings-to-promote-the-care-of-vulnerable-patients-in-jail/.
“a deep-seated culture”: “CRIPA Investigation of the New York City Department of Correction Jails on Rikers Island,” U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Aug. 4, 2014, 3.
“the number of mentally ill”: “The Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey,” Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriffs’ Association joint report, April 8, 2014, 6.
“When things go wrong”: Ibid., 8.
“There may be a limit”: Marc F. Abramson, “The Criminalization of Mentally Disordered Behavior,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 23, no. 4 (April 1972).
“Perhaps the most alarming”: “Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails,” 13.
“have been reported forcing a patient”: Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961), 44.
“However distant the staff tries”: Ibid., 81.
“Violent offenders, more often than not”: Bruce Western, “Violent Offenders, Often Victims Themselves, Need More Compassion and Less Punishment,” USA Today, Aug. 9, 2018. The findings of the Boston Reentry Study that Western and a team of scholars led are available at scholar.harvard.edu/brucewestern/working-papers.
2. The Other Prisoners
“The evidence does not show”: Katherine Fernandez Rundle, “In Custody Death Investigation Close-Out Memo.” I reported on the memo’s findings in “A Death in a Florida Prison Goes Unpunished,” New Yorker, March 23, 2017, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-death-in-a-florida-prison-goes-unpunished.
“We are appalled”: Julie K. Brown, “Grisly Photos Stir Doubts About Darren Rainey’s Death,” Miami Herald, May 6, 2017, account.miamiherald.com/paywall/registration?resume=149026764.
“From time to time, we get wind”: Everett Hughes, “Good People and Dirty Work,” Social Problems 10, no. 1 (Summer 1962): 7–8.
“He knows quite well”: Ibid., 8.
“small-minded, intoxicated”: Dana M. Britton, At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 53.
“a last resort for the unskilled”: David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2012), 146.
“the exercise of authority”: Frank Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 29.
“For his own clear conscience’s sake”: Ibid., 25.
“The job of the guard”: Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 59.
“a program for the recruitment”: James B. Jacobs and Lawrence J. Kraft, “Integrating the Keepers: A Comparison of Black and White Prison Guards in Illinois,” Social Problems 25, no. 3 (Feb. 1978): 304.
“Black inmates want black staff”: Ibid.
“A majority of guards”: Ibid., 316.
“Stigmatized places are more likely”: John M. Eason, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 16.
“For after all, if we were to ask”: Quoted in Britton, At Work in the Iron Cage, 51.
“service as a primary factor”: Lewis Z. Schlosser, David A. Safran, and Christopher A. Sbaratta, “Reasons for Choosing a Correction Officer Career,” Psychological Services 7, no. 1 (2010): 34.
“grew up dreaming”: Britton, At Work in the Iron Cage, 80.
“discrepancies between their own ethical standards”: Kelsey Kauffman, Prison Officers and Their World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 223‒24.
“sellouts”: Lateshia Beachum and Brittany Shammas, “Black Officers, Torn Between Badge and Culture, Face Uniquely Painful Questions and Insults,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/10/09/black-law-enforcement-protests/.
“It’s time to stop”: Linda Kleindiest, “Chiles Begins Campaign for ‘Safe Streets’ Program,” Florida Sun Sentinel, April 20, 1993.
&n
bsp; “The miserly Negro trader”: Daniel Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: H. B. Price, 1860), 140.
“horrorstruck and disgusted”: Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 36.
“therapeutic”: Ibid., 85.
“vulgar drudgery”: Quoted ibid., 158.
“There was apparently little stigma”: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 54–55.
“See those gentlemen”: Quoted in Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 157.
“Despite all of the information”: Dylan Hadre and Emily Widre, “Failing Grades: States’ Responses to COVID-19 in Jails and Prisons,” Prison Policy Initiative, June 25, 2020, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/failing_grades.html.
“They’re terrified”: Brendon Derr, Rebecca Grisbach, and Danya Issawi, “States Are Shutting Down Prisons as Guards Are Crippled by COVID-19,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 2021.
“This is crazy”: Melissa Montoya, “No Indictment for Corrections Officers in Inmate Death,” News-Press, July 7, 2015, www.news-press.com/story/news/local/2015/07/07/indictment-corrections-officers-inmate-death/29848827/.
“I never tell anyone what I do”: Quoted in Didier Fassin, Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2017), 146.
“why the image”: Quoted in Fassin, Prison Worlds, 329.
“I have the best job”: Jessica Benko, “The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison,” New York Times Magazine, March 19, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/the-radical-humaneness-of-norways-halden-prison.html.
3. Civilized Punishment
“Americans took enormous pride”: David J. Rothman, “Perfecting the Prison: United States, 1789–1865,” in The Oxford History of the Prison, ed. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100.
“Nothing was concealed or hidden”: Charles Dickens, The Works of Charles Dickens: American Notes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 116–17.
“unobtrusive margins”: John Pratt, Punishment and Civilization: Penal Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002), 52.
“I hold this slow”: Dickens, American Notes, 116.
“threshold of repugnance”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 121.
“Routine violence and suffering”: David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 243.
“the civilized prison became the invisible prison”: John Pratt, “Norbert Elias and the Civilized Prison,” British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 2 (1999): 287.
“We’re no longer to the point”: Quoted in Regan McCarthy, “Department of Corrections Workers Share Their View from the Inside,” WUSF Public Media, March 12, 2015, wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/2015-03-12/department-of-corrections-workers-share-their-view-from-the-inside.
“a bad tag”: “Prison Bill Emerges in the House—but Without Oversight Commission,” Palm Beach Post, March 19, 2015, www.palmbeachpost.com/2015/03/19/prison-bill-emerges-in-house-but-without-oversight-commission/.
“We order surgery and they don’t come in”: Quoted in Pat Beall, “Inmate Was Getting Only Tylenol for Cancer,” Palm Beach Post, Aug. 1, 2018, www.palmbeachpost.com/news/inmate-was-getting-only-tylenol-for-cancer/luLV1P4koWjXqCau46piMK/.
“serious problems with the delivery”: Matthew Clarke, “Court’s Expert Says Medical Care at Idaho Prison Is Unconstitutional,” Prison Legal News, Aug. 25, 2016, www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/aug/25/courts-expert-says-medical-care-idaho-prison-unconstitutional/.
“every dime saved on prisoner care”: Will Tucker, “Profits vs. Prisoners: How the Largest U.S. Prison Health Care Provider Puts Lives in Danger,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Oct. 27, 2016, www.splcenter.org/20161027/profits-vs-prisoners-how-largest-us-prison-health-care-provider-puts-lives-danger.
“Once or twice a week”: Ibid.
“A special burden of accountability”: John D. Donahue, The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 11.
“It’s a decision that’s best”: “DOC to Move Forward with Prison Health Privatization,” News Service of Florida, July 18, 2012, www.northescambia.com/2012/07/doc-to-move-forward-with-prison-health-privatization.
“The greater their social distance from us”: Everett Hughes, “Good People and Dirty Work,” Social Problems 10, no. 1 (Summer 1962): 9.
“as many as 125,000 people”: Supreme Court of the State of Florida, “Mental Health: Transforming Florida’s Mental Health System,” 2007, 10, www.floridasupremecourt.org/content/download/243049/file/11-14-2007_Mental_Health_Report.pdf.
“nowhere to go”: Liz Szabo, “Cost of Not Caring,” USA Today, May 12, 2014, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/12/mental-health-system-crisis/7746535.
“institutional brutality is deeply ingrained”: Steve J. Martin, “It’s Not Just Policing That Needs Reform. Prisons Need It, Too,” Washington Post, July 6, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/06/its-not-just-policing-that-needs-reform-prisons-need-it-too.
“Although every defense lawyer”: Julie K. Brown, “Rainey Family Settles Suit in Prison Shower Death,” Miami Herald, Jan. 26, 2018.
4. Joystick Warriors
“I am a torturer”: Eric Fair, Consequence: A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), 239.
“the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work”: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 121.
“Every drone strike is an execution”: Quoted ibid., 319.
“It is hard to imagine”: Quoted in Nick Cumming-Bruce, “The Killing of Qassim Suleimani Was Unlawful, Says UN Expert,” New York Times, June 9, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/world/middleeast/qassim-suleimani-killing-unlawful.htm.
“credible evidence of civilian casualties”: “Out of the Shadows: Recommendations to Advance Transparency in the Use of Lethal Force,” Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, June 2017, 6, web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/human-rights-institute/out_of_the_shadows.pdf.
“are based thousands of miles away”: Quoted in Charlie Savage, “U.N. Report Highly Critical of U.S. Drone Attacks,” New York Times, June 2, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/03drones.html.
“I shall argue what I’ve come to strongly believe”: Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 20.
“perpetrating, failing to prevent”: Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695.
“significant, independent predictor”: Shira Maguen et al., “The Impact of Killing on Mental Health Symptoms in Gulf War Veterans,” Psychological Trauma Theory Research Practice and Policy, no. 3 (2011): 25.
“PTSD as a diagnosis has a tendency”: Tyler Boudreau, “The Morally Injured,” Massachusetts Review 52, no. 3–4 (2011): 750.
“The object of waging a war”: George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 178.
“and my presence was guilt enough”: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 171.
“Your nerves, hell”: Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin, 2012), 60.
“a filthy and unfathomable war”: Robert J. Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 100.
“about behavior required for survival”: Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 696.
“asterisks in the clinician’s handbook�
��: David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 204.
“may unknowingly provide nonverbal”: Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 696.
“You can’t kill unless you are prepared”: M. Shane Riza, Killing Without Heart: Limits on Robotic Warfare in an Age of Persistent Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), 55.
“veterans are often the ones left holding”: Chris J. Antal, “Patient to Prophet: Building Adaptive Capacity in Veterans Who Suffer Moral Injury” (PhD diss., Hartford Seminary, 2017), 42.
5. The Other 1 Percent
“If the Civil War system”: Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 77.
“Only if people have a reasonable range”: Ibid., 82.
“70% of the volunteers in the city”: Quoted ibid., 83. See also Charles Rangel, “Why I Want the Draft,” New York Daily News, Nov. 22, 2006.
“fifty percent more non-fatal casualties”: Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, “Invisible Inequality: The Two Americas of Military Sacrifice,” University of Memphis Law Review 46 (2016): 563.