A fourteen-year-old parole violator was beaten to death by his boot camp guards in 2006 – story from BBC.
Charles Helms said Martin Lee Anderson could have avoided being hit if he had “walked, got up, finished the run”.
The youth collapsed while running laps on his first day at the Bay County camp for juvenile offenders in 2006.
He was beaten by guards for 30 minutes and made to inhale ammonia, and died in hospital a day later.Certainly this is an extreme and deplorable case, but isn’t it at least somewhat indicative of the attitudes society has toward the convicted? Ted Koppel recently appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” to promote a new documentary which investigates the practice of “warehousing” prisoners in California – confining them to cramped, filthy conditions because the state’s prison system is full to capacity. Certainly, prisoners do not deserve deluxe accommodations with gourmet meals and a premium-package satellite TV, but there is no justification for treating anyone like an animal in an enlightened society.
The reality of modern society is that our view of justice isn’t much more than revenge dressed up to appear more noble than it really is. We do what we do with those who break the law not to remove killers, thieves, rapists, and other dangerous individuals from society for the sake of everyone’s safety. Rather, we do it because, as a society, we feel a deep-seated disdain for our criminals (regardless of their crime) that can lead to forgetting their humanity, tolerance for cruelty – or worse yet, naked misanthropy.
The case of Martin Lee Anderson is the logical end result of this concept of justice.
