Your taxes pay for the criminal justice system which makes you the owner.
Yet you have no say in how it is run!
Why?
a species that fires bodyguards to protect it looses the ability to protect itself and is doomed to extinction
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/1 ... 75273.htmlShane Bauer, American Hiker, Reveals Iran Imprisonment Details
10/18/2012
An American freelance journalist who spent more than two years in an Iranian prison said he can relate to inmates in U.S. prisons who face indefinite solitary confinement without hope of reconnecting with other human beings because he's been through it.
Shane Bauer, one of three Americans detained in 2009 while hiking near the ill-defined Iranian border in Iraq's Kurdish region, wrote in Thursday's Mother Jones magazine of his visit to the solitary confinement unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. In the first major article he has written since he and friend Josh Fattal were released last year from Iran's Evin Prison, Bauer related similarities between the Iranian and California lockups.
"They are criminals; I was a hostage. They are spending many years in solitary; I did four months," he wrote. "But still, I can’t escape the fact that their desperate words sound like the ones that ricocheted through my own head when I was inside."
Bauer, Fattal and Sarah Shourd were accused of spying by the Iranians. The two men would be sentenced to eight years in prison, but not before Shourd was released in September 2010 on what the Iranians called "humanitarian grounds." By then, she had spent her entire 410 days in captivity separated from the men in solitary confinement. Seven months later, she told The Huffington Post that she suffered from PTSD that she attributed in part to her isolation.
In a video accompanying his article, Bauer said the time they spent in solitary was "the worst experience of all of our lives."
Although the three hostages held a news conference upon being reunited in September 2011, they have kept a low profile over the last year and have turned down most media requests for interviews.
Only in May did they make headlines when Bauer married Shourd -- whom he proposed to in prison -- in a private ceremony that was reported afterward.
The article in Mother Jones, where Bauer was a contributor before his ill-fated hike, is the first detailed description of the three friends' ordeal. But the focus is on Pelican Bay's Security Housing Unit (SHU, pronounced "shoe"), where 94 percent of prisoners are warehoused in solitary with little chance of getting out.
In 2005, the last year the federal government released data, more than 80,000 people were in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons -- at least 11,730 of them in California. Bauer cites studies that find those subjected to prolonged isolation show "psychosis-like symptoms." And while he is hardly the first to equate solitary confinement to torture or even the first to focus on the "cruel and degrading" conditions inside California isolation units or even to tour Pelican Bay, his first-hand experience in Iran offers a perspective few share.
Bauer wrote that he reviewed medical research about the effects of isolation. "I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation -- with which I luckily had a modicum of experience before I was jailed -- would chase them away," he wrote. "Was the uncontrollable banging on my cell door, the pounding of my fists into my mattress, just a common symptom of isolation? I wonder what happens when someone with a history of violence is seized by such uncontrollable rage."
Bauer is seen in a video nervously driving toward the supermax prison and later standing in an inmate's tiny quarters: