Thoughts on Dayan

Perhaps the most striking idea from The Law is a White Dog so far has been the difference between the death of the body and the death of the spirit or mind. This idea was interesting when it was applied to the Guantanamo Bay prison because it discussed how torture and solitary confinement had caused inmates to die in spirit, but still be alive physically. The author brought up Locke's idea that "consciousness, or awareness, made the human a person" (pg. 121, towards the bottom). Through the process of torture and solitary confinement, inmates lose their sense of being and give up. The best way to put this is said very precisely by the poet W. H. Auden in The Shield of Achilles: "They lost their pride/And died as men before their bodies died" (http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/99/jrieffel/poetry/auden/achilles.html). It is a disturbing thought that in Guantanamo and other supermax facilities that the penitentiary seeks to strip inmates not only of their citizenship (civil death), but also of their humanity or personhood. What is more disturbing is the fact that intangible beings are being legitimized, as seen in the example of haunted real estate and granting legal validity to spirits, while tangible beings are being de-legitimized and are stripped of their validity and cease to exist civilly in many cases. In cases of torture, dehumanization, and killing the spirit of people, the situation that happened at Abu Ghraib prison seemed to be a very obvious example. I am curious as to how the photographing of the torture can be explained-- Is this just a way to further dehumanize? Or is there something else behind torture and images of violence inflicted upon others that legitimizes something in the minds of the officers/soldiers/torturers? I do not think I fully understand how torture or suffering of others can be regarded with such ambivalence--many Americans looked at these images of Abu Ghraib in horror--and I would be interested in the thought process of those inflicting the violence and how they could dehumanize a person to that extent. I would also like to further look into how people could perhaps have been stripped of personhood (if so, to what extent) before they even entered the prison system. For example, would disenfranchisement through extreme poverty play a large role in making a person less of a person?