Examining institutional torture in the prison system
An Interview with Dr. Jessica Wolfendale, 2019 Rynne Research Fellow
Dr. Jessica Wolfendale is a professor of philosophy and department chair at Marquette University. In 2019 she received a Rynne Research Fellowship from the Center for Peacemaking to work on a project titled “Tolerating Torture: The Creation of a Torture Culture in the US.” She spoke with the Center about her project, background, and what she hopes to study moving forward.
What sparked your interest in philosophy, political violence, and torture culture?
The question that drew me to study philosophy was actually quite specific. I became interested initially in thinking about how soldiers must be trained to kill in order to fight in wars. And I was curious as to how that process occurs and the impact it has on soldiers and their moral thinking about war. So that was actually the question that led me back to philosophy.
My Ph.D. thesis was on military torture. I became more interested in how military forces in countries like the U.S., which have a commitment to human rights, can nonetheless become involved in the use of torture. Broadly speaking, what unites my research interests in political violence is this question about how people come to see violence against others as permissible, as legitimate, and as consistent with moral values in the state context. So I’m not interested particularly in criminal violence, I’m interested in state-sponsored violence and the processes that are used to justify and rationalize it, and how that shapes individual perpetrators’ moral thinking.
How did the idea for your current project come to fruition?
Well, most of my prior work looked at the question of torture in the context of the war on terror, and that’s where a lot of the philosophical work on torture occurs, with many scholars arguing back and forth about whether the use of torture could be permissible to fight terrorism. I’ve argued against that view in many places, and then I became interested in thinking about how narrow that context was when thinking about torture.
What drew me to the project that’s the basis of my Rynne Fellowship was thinking about torture from the victim’s point of view — looking at the distinctive features that torture has and understanding how victims experience torture. If we take it a step further, by looking at other practices within our society that might produce those same effects, we might have to start thinking of torture as something that occurs more broadly than we would like to admit.
With the Rynne Fellowship, I ended up focusing on torture in prison and making the case that the structure of the prison institution itself creates vulnerabilities to torture, particularly in African American inmates, but not exclusively. So, I developed the concept of a torturous institution, an institution that structurally creates vulnerabilities to torture, and used this idea to explore the experience of torture within prison and those who are subjected to it. Part of what makes torture distinct is that is a form of treatment that expresses moral exclusion: People who are viewed as vulnerable to torture are excluded from full moral consideration, and their vulnerability to torture reinforces their moral exclusion. I think that’s the case in the U.S. prison system.
The upshot is that we have to think of torture more broadly than has traditionally been construed, at least in the philosophical debate.
How has your work at Marquette and experience with the Center for Peacemaking influenced your approach to this topic?
In 2019, Rev. Michael McNulty, S.J. and I co-organized a conference on torture. Talking to Michael and working with the Center has really made me want to focus very much on the victims of torture as a primary focus in my research rather than whether torture could ever be justified using hypothetical cases.
It’s important to me to understand torture from the victim’s point of view. What does that tell us about torture? What purpose does torture serve? How does torture affect individuals? Communities? How we could stop it? The conference we organized had speakers from community groups, prison advocates, people working against the use of solitary confinement and protesting prison conditions. Their perspectives really opened my eyes to the scale of this problem in U.S. society. That’s something I really, really value from my connection with the Center.
What is one thing you wish everyone knew about philosophy/political violence/torture culture?
What I would like people to understand is that torture is not just this one-off thing that happens in emergencies. Torture is very much embedded in central U.S. institutions and, frankly, always has been since the time of slavery.
Torture and the way in which torture functions to morally exclude people is something we have to reckon with as a society. I think if we if we limit our thinking about torture to extreme cases of ticking bombs and terrorists, then we’re blinding ourselves to the true scale and scope of torture that’s tolerated in U.S. society.
I suppose that’s a kind of call to arms. I would like people to confront the reality of torture, and then to facilitate genuine change.
What’s next for you?
Going forward I want to look at intimate partner violence and how the concept of torture can be used to understand the severity of suffering involved, along with the ways it is tolerated in our society.
Read Prison as a Torturous Institution by Jessica Wolfendale in Res Philosophica.
