American Society for Public Administration - Vol. 28 No. 7 - July 2005

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Jeremy F. Plant

Like most Americans, I was shocked and angered by the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. But unlike other observers, I had a personal point of reference that turned my anger into something much deeper. For a good portion of my military service, in the middle years of the Vietnam War, I served as a prison guard at the First Army Prison in Fort Monmouth, NJ. After I had wiped away the disbelief that Military Police guards could engage in the sort of behavior I saw in front of my eyes, I thought back to the ethical issues faced by military prison guards and how much things had changed since 1970, the year I first heard the cell block doors slam shut at the long-defunct New Jersey prison.

My route to guarding military prisoners made sense in the troubled years of the Vietnam conflict. Drafted in the first wave of graduate students who had lost their deferment, and before the lottery (I was in basic training then; my birthday came up 365 in the first lottery.), my plan was to let the current take me downstream until I reached a point that required me to exercise a moral judgment; being sent to Vietnam, perhaps, or being put into combat. Until that point was reached, I treated the Army like a job, where it is easier and more bearable to work hard and do as well as you can at any reasonable task. By luck, I was one of two out of over 200 in my basic training company who were sent to Military Police training instead of the Infantry; many of the others have their names now on The Wall in Washington.

In the draftee Army, the Military Police was an integral part of the Regular Army. In MP School at Fort Gordon, GA, we shared training with National Guard and Reserve units. Due to an incident at The Presidio in San Francisco in which untrained soldiers assigned to prison guard duty had killed a prisoner, the Army had started a new program to train MPs as prison guards with a new military specialty assigned, 95C (regular MPs were assigned 95B). The Charlies (Army code for 95Cs) would be volunteers who agreed to additional training after finishing MP school. For many of us, that was an easy decision to make. Most military prisons and stockades were stateside, and the 95Bs in Vietnam pulled many of the most dangerous jobs, especially leading convoys and being exposed to enemy snipers. Plus, we thought the war might wind down at some point soon; things were looking up in the early months of 1970 and staying in training another month was that much better odds of staying on this side of the war.

So there was no lack of volunteers for the new program. Many of us had some college education and a few were college grads. The training program was surprisingly good, although it was hampered by the lack of a military prison at the base where we could get actual experience. But all of our instructors had extensive guard experience and they hammered home a number of points that I still recall as insightful. One, avoid a moralistic approach in dealing with prisoners; no matter what crime put them in prison, treat them according to their conduct as prisoners. Two, recognize the limits of your powers; there is always an informal power arrangement in a prison that you can't change, but can use to your advantage; and three, maintain your own personal integrity, recognizing that you could easily find yourself behind bars for misusing your authority. (Throughout MP training we were told to expect hostility from other units and other soldiers, and this was good advice; everywhere I was stationed the MPs were treated as pariahs.)

After graduating, a number of us were sent to Fort Monmouth to replace MPs without the 95C training. The prison usually housed around 50 inmates, either in detainee status (charged with a serious crime but not yet court-martialed; the Army had no bail equivalent) or court-martialed for a serious crime. Many of the prisoners were from the Greater New York City area, and most were minority-group members, unlike the mostly white guard force.

In the 9 months I worked at the facility, I can't recall a single example of serious prisoner abuse. Our relationship with the prisoners was often tense but rarely confrontational. They were worked hard outside the prison during the day and put to bed early. The culture of the organization discouraged all but superficial fraternization and the only parallel with today's problems was an occasional need to strip-search a prisoner for drugs or home-made weapons. Of course, at that time, there were no female guards and no effort was made to humiliate beyond the inherently degrading act of stripping naked.

My point in all this is simple: Abu Ghraib could, and probably would, have been avoided if we had today the sort of individual the Army trained and assigned in the 1970s as a prison guard. The ethical distance between the Army prison of 1970 and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is so vast that it can't be explained away by any of the simple explanations given for the abuses. Yes, incarcerating hostile non-U.S. citizens is different from imprisoning court-martialed soldiers, but wouldn't the same rules we followed work better than the non-functional approach still defended by the Administration?

What are the lessons? Let me suggest the most obvious:

• Professionalize the units. From top to bottom, the Army must go back to the Vietnam era model of trained, regular Army officers and enlisted personnel to assign to prisoner supervision. This is a part of the war on terrorism that isn't going way. The Army Lite approach of assigning such work to Reserve and Guard units is a mistake. Bring back the Military Police to what it once was, one of the elite branches of the Army.
• Make it clear that the unit assigned to run the prison, and not intelligence operatives, is in charge of everything but the interrogation of prisoners, and will monitor such activities to ensure they are in conformance with strict procedural standards.
• Create an understanding among the prisoners that only their behaviors within the prison, not their beliefs and prior actions, are the basis of punishment; once established, enforce the rules strictly and fairly.
• Utilize facilities that are well-designed, functional, sanitary, and secure. Both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo fail in almost every aspect of design as modern prisons.

ASPA member Jeremy F. Plant is professor of public policy and administration in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State-Harrisburg. E-mail: jfp2@psu.edu .

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