The History Of Torture

Scott, George Ryley Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780710308375
• eBook ISBN: 9781136191671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2005. Torture, an enduring and seemingly not declining aspect of man's relationship to his fellow man, is an enduring thread through human history. Whether it be practiced by primitive people, the ancient Greeks or the Catholic Church, whether it be ancient China, Japan, 1930's Germany, or Northern Ireland today, torture is alarmingly systematic and consistent in its methods. Impaling, burning, rack or wheel, mutilation, drawing and quartering, burning or hanging alive in chains. A very comprehensive and readable work.

PART ONE

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
OF TORTURE

CHAPTER I

THE MEANING AND LIMITATIONS OF TORTURE

A Question of Terminology

IT must be admitted that the meaning of torture is not easy to define. Invariably is one likely to formulate a definition which is either too wide or too narrow in its scope. Realizing to the full that a serious error in either direction is bound to detract from the value of any study of torture, I feel it to be essential that I should, at the outset, define with some exactitude what, so far as this book is concerned, the word torture implies. It is important, for instance, to realize clearly that there is no rigid line of demarcation between torture and punishment. Any distinction is dependent largely upon the reaction of the individual victim to physical and mental suffering. It is necessary to consider in what circumstances the one implies the other. It has always been customary for society and the State, from the beginning of civilization to the present day, to attempt the justification of torture by placing it within the category of punishments, and, further, in this way to deny that any form of torture is used at all. Largely because of this almost universal practice, in which the term punishment is employed as a euphemism for torture, it has never been thoroughly and adequately realized to what extent torture has been employed in past ages, and, additionally, to what extent it is employed to-day.

Much of this lack of knowledge concerning its extent and universality has arisen through the wide acceptance of the legal definition in contradistinction to any comprehensive elucidation of torture; which acceptance has in large part been due to the fact that no other more exponential and truer definition has been presented. According to the legal definition, torture was a form of cruelty or method of tormenting sanctioned by the State, and executed by duly accredited or appointed officials, through its judicial authorities. It was held to be justifiable, and was authorized and executed for the purpose of inducing a person accused of a crime to confess his guilt or a witness to present evidence. In those countries, of which England was the most notable, which at no time allowed accused persons or witnesses to be subjected to the quœstion in order to secure a confession or to extract information, it was contended that torture was in-existent. By observing a sharp line of demarcation between those forms of cruelty authorized and practised for a specific purpose, as in the case of judicial torture, and cruelty imposed as punishment, it was easy to deny an allegation of torture even where criminals, under the name of retribution or prison discipline, were subjected to the most fiendish, barbarous and terrible forms of persecution.

At the same time, the error must not be made, as it so often is made by those whose humanitarianism has run to seed, of classifying every form of punishment and every form of cruelty, in all circumstances, as torture. It is true that, under certain conditions, as we shall see when we come to consider psychological torture, a form of punishment considered by one individual to be relatively mild, might, to another, constitute a most horrible form of torture; but, generally speaking, the majority of the punishments inflicted to-day in civilized countries and under the ægis of the law, cannot be placed within the category of physical torture.

Torture is not a mere matter of terminology, however. Death, in itself, deliberately induced, in many cases, does not rank as a form of physical torture. But torture exists where death is preceded and caused by acts which involve unjustifiable suffering or pain. Where any procedure involving cruelty, suffering and pain is inflicted upon an individual, in any circumstances, and for any purpose, whether the punishment ends with such persecution or is followed by the extinction of life, it does most assuredly constitute torture. The objects of persecution, whatever their nature and how-ever serious their import, neither justify the torturing of the individual nor the description of the torture by another name.

The acceptance of the legal definition means the acceptance of the view that torture is applied only by the State, for the express objects defined. The act of cruelty used by the State as a form of torture, if committed by an individual or by a number of citizens, without the authority of the State, would not be legitimate and would not constitute torture: it would rank as an assault. Obviously such an interpretation is most unsatisfactory and logically indefensible.

From the viewpoint of the unfortunate person who is being subjected to any act which entails suffering and pain analogous to that experienced by the victim of torture, it is a matter of indifference by what precise term this persecution is described, and whether it is being executed by a private individual or by a State official.

Clearly the sufferer, provided the degree of persecution or cruelty is sufficiently severe, is being subjected to what can be described as nothing less than torture. And equally clearly the sufferer is the one person who is in a position to provide the most fitting evidence as to the reality or otherwise of such torture. The judge responsible for the sentence, and the executioner responsible for the infliction of the punishment, apart from the fact that they are prejudiced witnesses, cannot be so reliable in their decision as to whether or not the specific sentence ranks as torture, as is the actual victim.

The Reality of Psychological Torture

Here we come up against the fact, all too imperfectly and all too rarely realized, that there is in existence a form of torture distinct from physical injury or torment: a form of torture which is psychological in its trend. It may exist in addition to physical torture. It may exist where there is no physical torture at all.

The substitution of psychological methods of dealing with crime in the place of many antiquated physical methods does not necessarily mean, as is generally thought, that torture has been removed in toto from the prison system. It merely means that physical torture, in the shape of corporal punishment, the treadmill, the crank, et al., has been to a big extent replaced by other and more subtle methods.

The reformation in prison methods has been coincident with the evolution of a new type of prisoner. Man to-day is, generally speaking, and in normal circumstances, more humane and less brutal than was his prototype of fifty and a hundred years ago. He is, to use another form of terminology, “softer.” This applies to the criminal element in society exactly as it does to the respectable element. The popular notion that the criminals of the world are “tougher” specimens than are the law-abiding members of the public is a fallacy. It arises through the error of accepting those exceptional cases of “toughness” which figure in sensational newspaper accounts and in crime fiction as representative of the criminal world. The majority of criminals, as Dr. Amos Squire, one-time chief physician of Sing Sing, has pointed out, are indistinguishable in physical or mental attainments from the average respectable golf-playing, cinema-going, radio-listening citizen.

The mental torture induced by imprisonment, with its destructive effects upon initiative, will-power, originality and ambition, can be incalculable. Upon some natures the segregation of mind is even more paralysing and cumulative in its effects than is any form of physical segregation. The contention that the modern prison is a convalescent home or a rest-camp, and errs on the side of leniency or beneficence, is as erroneous in its implications as are the ideas secured by visitors who are conveyed around a “model” prison upon a tour of inspection. A prison is a prison whatever amenities form part of the curriculum. Moreover it is possible for a governor or a warder, even in a modern “humane” prison, to render the life of the prisoner a veritable hell. Ninety years ago, in Birmingham borough prison, the governor subjected the prisoners to various illegal tortures unknown to the visiting justices. It is not impossible, in relation to psychological torture at any rate, for an analogous state of affairs to exist to-day.

Illegitimate, Surreptitious and Camouflaged Torture

The prohibition of torture and persecution during criminal investigations and in prison management, by the State, is no guarantee of their non-existence in the community. Any such prohibition does not even mean that the State itself never employs such methods. For instance, although torture, either by the State or by private individuals, is prohibited in Great Britain, flogging is still included among the punishments prescribed in the penal code. The use of corporal punishment is justified as a legitimate means of correction; it does not rank as (what it actually is) a form of torture. In the United States of America, for many decades, torture has been prohibited both in the penal code and in private life, yet flogging has been employed in several States and on many occasions since 1868; and the “third degree,” which incorporates many forms of torture, is surreptitiously but widely resorted to by the police in the securing of confessions. The American public, the American judges, and the American Government know that this “third degree” is in constant employment: they make no real or sincere attempt to suppress a practice which is as much a crime as are any of the offences of the individuals upon whom it is used.

To what extent torture is employed privately it is quite impossible to do more than guess at. Although it is true that the individual has the right of appeal to the law in any case of assault, there are lots of instances where no such appeal is made. There are wives and there are children who suffer severe physical punishment and take no action against those who have inflicted such punishment. There are hundreds of cases where terrible mental suffering is borne in silence, often, too, in circumstances where it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove anything which would secure a conviction in a court of law. There are other cases where, for many reasons, the suffering and persecuted party cannot face the publicity and exposure which a court action ensures. There are prostitutes in the power of bullies and pimps, and there are criminals tied up with gangs, who cannot seek the protection of the law.

CHAPTER II

THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF TORTURE

A Primary Means of Exacting Vengeance

ONCE it is conceded and accepted that there are forms of torture in addition to the type acknowledged and defined by law, we have gone a long way towards realizing that torture is something which has existed from the beginning of time. In relation to its true and wide significance it is as erroneous to assert that torture was inexistent before the time of the Romans as it is to assert that it disappeared from most European countries in the eighteenth century. Both these assertions have been made. Each assertion represents a perversion of the truth.

It is no exaggeration to say that every man and woman is a potential torturer. The scope of this potentiality, and likewise its expression, are extended by the fact that what, by the persecuted party, is recognized as torture, may not, and probably in many circumstances will not, be so recognized or admitted by the individual responsible for putting the torture into operation. This non-recognition or non-acceptance of torture by the individual, by the mob, and, in certain circumstances, by the State, is responsible for the wide extension of persecution in any one period of history, for its continuance through the ages, and for its existence to-day. It is further the cause of the abolition of torture being a much more difficult affair than the average person realizes, involving matters which are outside the scope of ordinary vision and which have implications that are seldom fully recognized.

In its simplest and most ecumenic form torture represents a ready, an efficacious, a satisfactory, and a crude means of exacting vengeance; especially of exacting that type of vengeance which is more concerned with the individual than with the State. That is to say, torture in any ordinary circumstances, appeals more to the sense of retribution developed in the injured individual for a crime or an offence concerning himself or his immediate family, than it appeals to the State as a means of securing satisfaction for a crime committed against the community, or an offence concerned with abstract principles. It is this attitude which is responsible for the view expressed so often by those individuals intimately concerned with a horrible crime that the penalty of death, in itself, is not enough to satisfy the call for justice. The personal cry for vengeance demands that before death the criminal must suffer long and severely; in other words, that torture must precede death. This primitive cry for vengeance is as common and as urgent in the civilized countries of to-day as it was among the North American savages careering around the captives whom they were burning at the stake. It is merely that society, in virtue of laws passed by citizens, who, at the time of making those laws, were not imbued with this passion for private vengeance, has diverted or submerged the urge. It is not that, fundamentally and individually speaking, the urge does not exist.

An Expression of Power

In this vengeance inherent in all forms of torture lies the key to its use as an expression, by the individual, of the will to power, and, by the State, of authority and autocratic domination. The expression or satisfaction of this demand for vengeance on the part of a group of individuals or of society as a whole, which is an extension of the individual’s private urge for revenge, has formed a part of the policy adopted by every leader of mankind, starting with the chief, the king, or the emperor, and descending, through various stages, to the mob leader, whether he be the incendiary calling to arms a rabble of political rebels, or the gangster chief directing the criminal activities of a mob of social outlaws. Nothing was, and nothing is, better calculated to enhance the prestige and authority of the leader than the handing over to his followers, for punishment, of their enemy.¹ It was due to a realization of this primeval fact that torture was first adopted and authorized as part of the penal code of a race, a government, or a branch of society. The more the leader showed himself as an advocate and a devotee of vengeance against the avowed and suspected enemies of the branch of society he headed, the more did he find himself respected by his immediate followers. Coincidentally the tyrant fed, in true anthropophagous style, upon his own tyranny. The more tyrannous he became the more powerful. Torture proved itself to be a footstool to greater power just as it was a means of developing personal vanity in one’s own power.

As society developed out of savagery into civilization, and as codes of laws and regulations were enacted, the torture which was inflicted by primitive man to satisfy his vengeance against enemies without and within his race, crystallized itself into a definite method of torture justified as a system of punishment; as a means, adopted by the ruler in an autocratic country and by the State in an oligarchy, of compelling subservience to authority; and, in the case of smaller mobs or gangs, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Psychological Aspects of Torture
• Part II The History of Torture
• Part III The Technique of Torture
• Part IV The Case Against Torture
• Bibliography
• Index