Let me Change your Mind

Be a fool with me and imagine this: how would the military do the dishes? I'd guess with a gun. Direct traffic? Gun. Bag your groceries, operate on your appendix? I don't think it's a secret that there are specialties, and the military seems to be "ID the enemy and annihilate". Sound right? I'm not saying that someone from the Army can't be a good mom or that a Marine can't cook a mean pesto, but it's not in their training. It's not expected as part of their roles.

For a good example of people operating outside their areas of expertise, look no further than prison guards pretending to be medical professionals. Covid has shown us the idiocy of this. They're a whip at locking doors and counting (sometimes all the way to 100!) but to expect them to act as if they had the education of a 2, 4 or 10 year education seems like the acme of foolishness to me.

Prison staff also aren't known to be the most caring or compassionate people: both traits necessary to be in any position of... caregiving.. I know, it sounds like I’m being a wise-ass, but think how simple so much of this is and so unnecessary to say and yet it’s STILL being done!.

Prisons operate on a military hierarchy with captains and lieutenants, sergeants and skippers... okay, I made up that last one. But they have radios and codes, and they talk exactly like we would when we were playing army as kids. Many of them are in fact ex-military and their pay comes with them. In their training, they have whole days and weeks of hand-to-hand training and firearms training on a range that also extends every year. Incidentally, I've never been to a prison that wasn't within earshot of their firing range meaning I get to hear the sounds of people like them training to kill people like me. Can you think of a clearer way to terrorize while simultaneously instilling that "I am the enemy"? i.e., military.

You may wonder how much training they get on interpersonal communication skills? Training as counsellors? Training for de-escalation that doesn't involve threats of violence?. I’m sure you can imagine, they don't let us in on their training courses, but what little I’ve been able to gather from reading articles and books like Connover's "Newjack" and Bauer's "American Prison", it seems like you can count the hours of interpersonal training on one hand whereas you'd need a calendar to figure how much time is spent learning to hurt, incapacitate, and kill us.

One of the most recent prison reforms (noted lately for its complete inaccessibility to most every inmate) signed in around 2019 was called The First Step Act and it requires training for de-escalation for all staff. This is just occurring to them!

Either way, I've seen little to indicate they are receiving any training on this or if they are, that they are taking it seriously. Unless part of that training is calling us names, insulting our mothers (a warden did this) or threatening to shoot us in the face with a pepper-ball gun. They are really towing the line on those fronts!

In Plato's "Republic", he outlines an ideal government, and it really is a wealth of wisdom and though it's been touted as the pinnacle of philosophy by many who are in the know, it STILL hasn't been praised enough. He gets into so many details on how people act and why and what the best way to govern people would be based on dispositions... But for our purposes, I want to outline one part about why the military shouldn't run the state: they will treat the people like the enemy. Just like merchants will treat the people like a commodity. Sound familiar?

But as often comes from reading philosophy, Plato depresses me. This is a guy so well-renowned throughout a history of 2k years as saying it all and the rest being "just footnotes to Plato". Lauded as the wisest man of philosophy and yet.. here we are and it doesn't seem like we've learned much.

We have an institution of imprisonment often euphemistically called "corrections" as a sort of tongue-in-cheek nod to its purpose: meant to help change us, alter our behavior, make us better people, right? At which of these aims is a military approach expected to succeed?