|
<< Back
How Could Detainee Suicides be Prevented?
Ideas: Change routines, increase vigilance, reach captives emotionally
CAROL ROSENBERG
Miami Herald
June 25, 2006
MIAMI -- As commanders search for ways to reduce the risk of suicide inside the prison camps after three Arab captives hanged themselves at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base this month, outsiders argue that the U.S. military should rethink the basics.
They suggest changing anything from the guards' routine to the way authorities treat the detainees who have been held on suspected links to terrorist groups for more than four years.
"I would think that something about the prison routine has to be examined. That's probably why this happened," said Victor Lofgreen, a Chicago-based consultant on prisons and a former military police officer.
"Of course, detainees watch the routine and know everything that happens -- who cheats on the time clock and goes out for a cigarette, how often a guard goes by. They'll study them for months and months and use it -- whether it's for escape or to hurt the staff or suicide."
Lofgreen, a former prison superintendent, said no prison can be made suicide-proof.
But you reduce the risk, he said, by increasing vigilance: perhaps through the numbers of guards and cameras; reducing the items that captives might turn into weapons of self-destruction; and constantly monitoring their emotional state.
"Essentially, if you take an institution and make it into a suicide detention facility, you'd have to take out everything ... and turn them into nonlethal kinds of materials: paper gowns, paper sheets for the beds, paper covers for the pillows, plastic utensils that are very weak," he said.
Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a prison camps spokesman, declined to discuss any different thinking or approaches being implemented at the prison because the June 10 suicides are still under investigation.
Army Gen. Bantz Craddock, the Southern Command chief, said the military will now take an "idiosyncratic approach" to prison operations.
"You can take a bedsheet, you can take a blanket, you can turn those into means to take one's life," he said. Now, the challenge is to "balance between the comfort items we would like to provide and the point at which the comfort items in the possession of the few determined detainees would be turned into something that would contribute to them taking their lives."
Yet, lawyers, Lofgreen and a former Army Muslim cleric who worked at the prison camps argue that the institution should find a way to reach captives on an emotional level.
"They've been transported clear away from the conflict," Lofgreen said. "After a certain time of incarceration in this type of isolated setting, it can have this kind of effect on people. Even if their motivation is delusional ... that doesn't free them from their natural humanity."
And don't try to lecture them on Islam, warns retired Army Capt. James "Youseff" Yee, who served as Muslim chaplain in the prison camps in 2002 and 2003.
Now a civilian with an honorable discharge, he was investigated for mishandling classified information -- but cleared.
Back then, Yee said, camp commanders had vinyl, no-tear aprons for captives they considered suicidal -- meaning they couldn't knot them into nooses -- and designed a campaign using Koranic verse to bombard captives with the message that suicide is a sin. Yee opposed it.
"Telling someone God will be angry if you commit suicide... is not effective," he said.
Instead, "Find something which they value in their life, that gives them reason to live. Give them some hope to live," he said.
<< Back
|
