Why Torture?: To Punish

Recall that in my post "What is Torture?" I promised more discussion on the reasons officials use torture. The list stated in the Torture Convention includes:

• To obtain information
• To obtain a confession for acts already committed
• As punishment for an act already committed
• Intimidation
• Coercion
• Any reason based on discrimination of any kind

I discussed torture as a political tool to intimidate populations; in this post and the next I will discuss torture to obtain information on future operations, to obtain a confession, and as punishment.

First, punishment: those of you in the class will remember Lynn Hunt's discussion of torture as a tool to heal a community after unlawful acts had been committed:

“Under the traditional understanding, the pains of the body did not belong entirely to the individual condemned person. Those pains had the higher religious and political purposes of redemption and reparation of the community…the offender served as a kind of sacrificial victim whose suffering would restore wholeness to the community and order to the state” (94).

In this sense, torture was used not just as punishment for the act committed, but as a method of spiritual redemption. Torture is no longer considered a valid form of punishment, although some argue that some aspects of the U.S. sentencing--for example, sentencing a youth under the age of 18 at the time a crime was committed to life without parole--violate international law and constitute torture. For more information, see the Human Rights Watch Report "When I Die...They'll Send Me Home."

Jeffrie Murphy disputes that torture is an acceptable form of punishment in the modern world in his book Retribution, Justice and Therapy:

“[T]orture is addressed exclusively to the sentient or heteronomous—i.e., animal—nature of a person. Sending painful voltage through a man’s testicles to which electrodes have been attached, or boiling him in oil, or eviscerating him, or gouging out his eyes—these are not human ways of relating to another person. He could not be expected to understand this while it goes on…a process whose very point is to reduce him to a terrified, defecating, urinating, screaming animal… We have here a paradigm of not treating a person as a person—and thus an undermining of that very value (autonomous human personhood) on which any conception of justice must rest.”*

While before, torture was used as a tool in order to restore the humanity and dignity lost during a crime,  our changed understanding of human nature and the human body means that we now believe that torture denies the humanity and dignity of the individual, regardless of their culpability in a crime. For punishment to be effective, we must acknowledge that the criminal made his decision as a person, with the full autonomy of a person, and deserves to be punished as a person.

Notice also that Murphy addresses the effect of torture on the torturer. By torturing another person, the torturer plays a significant role in taking the victim's the dignity and autonomy away from him. I will further discuss the effect of torture on those that carry it out in future posts.

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UPDATE to provide reference:
*Jeffrie Murphy, "Cruel and Unusual Punishments," in his Retribution, Justice and Therapy (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1979) quoted in Golash, Deirdre, "Torture and Self-Defense," p. 266, found in S. P. Lee (ed.), Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory. Springer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands (2007). 263-271.