The Australian legal system is founded upon torture. The threat and sometimes reality of suffering is deliberately used to generate fast confessions, guilty pleas, uncontested convictions. The practice is so routine, and those affected so marginalized if not despised, that it isn’t recognised for what it is, often even by those affected. In any parallel cases in which the threat or reality of a similar level of suffering were used to generate confessions, it would be expected that lawyers for the accused would ask that such evidence by ruled inadmissable. But not for these people, not for this threat, not for this suffering, and so not for these confessions. Not for this torture.

It is a truism that an enormous proportion of crime in Australia is ‘drug crime’, if not directly involving the production, sale or use of drugs, then property crime of impoverished addicts who need money usually for illegal and expensive drugs. It is a banality that impoverished junkies and other drug addicts make up a huge proportion of people in magistrates courts and in prison. And it is equally obvious that a significant proportion of people arrested for such crimes are addicts, overwhelmingly impoverished addicts, the lumpen proletariat - and that police know this.

Addicts who commit property crimes to get money for drugs, or because they have no money for food because they are broke because of the cost of regular drug use, live on short cycles. Money and drugs need to be regularly aquired, often more than once a day. People dealing with such people know this. And thus it is a uncontroversial police wisdom that any threat to detain such a person overnight, for example, is a threat that such a person will begin to physically withdraw in a police cell. They may be withdrawing already during arrest and interview, and thus feel an overwhelming desire to get out for reasons not connected to the charges per se. The ease with which such people can be effectively coerced to supply not only confessions but in some cases information used to get others is legendary.

Such people may be guilty of the particular offence, or at least some offence, but in any case will often confess to more-or-less whatever they are being accused of (within limits of course), in order to prevent the acute pain of withdrawal.

The Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as:

…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

I literally cannot think of a way of interpreting this which doesn’t mean that the practices being described count as torture.

A more interesting question would be why this isn’t something obvious to all.

As part of Sarah’s birthday, as an expression of love, my love for her that is, I wrote her a tiny short story, which was going to be called “Provisional Title” until I changed my mind. That’s not a joke. By giving a story I give up intellectual property rights, of course, or anyway I guess, so by pasting it below I may be violating something, but here it is:

Desire and exhaustion

He was tired.

He had spent the last few years starring in such romantic comedies as You’re On Speakerphone (“See the sparks fly when they both stop taking their medication!”), Justine and Justin Get Twittered, and the romantic thriller I Know Where You Live and I’m Stealing Your Mail (“Revenge is a dish best served cold, and then left at the side of your plate.”). Desire, banter, happy endings. He had always wanted a job he could be proud to do badly. Despite which, his childhood desire to become the house detective in a seedy motel had receded into the mountainous border regions of his mind, hiding in the cave of an unwritten chapter of his imaginary autobiography entitled “Ineffective Detective”. His next movie was to be an animated adaptation of George the Bi-Polar Bear, an insanely popular, five-hundred page children’s book about one woman’s heroic struggle to turn off her smoke alarm. His role as the love interest had been added in development, along with the upbeat conclusion (she holds a chair so he can jab a broom up at her very high ceiling to push the button). His final line, leitmotif of his character’s asinine ‘wisdom’: “Everyone has dreams.” Cue kiss. Fade to black.

He felt like he’d been in a sugar coma for the last three years; his dread was hardly nameless. The key question was: why was there nothing instead of something? Before hitting minor-celebrity big time, he had turned down the lead role in Perseverance, the story of a man who refuses to give up on life and his dream of opening a truly first-class piercing salon, even after a freak accident leaves him a quadriplegic without sight, hearing, a sense of taste or smell, and unable to speak, feel above or below the neck, or blink. Instead he did the voice-over for a micro-budget documentary called NGO Wars, the tag-line for which was: “Give a man a net and he can fish; have your guns stolen by men and they can take over the means of production.”

He had raised his eyebrows and kept them raised.

He was tired, but also hungry. Where were his guns?

Not literally, of course. Literally, they were in a cabinet by the bedroom closet.