This last to be translated as, it is just that, the mortality rate is greater, but if you disqualify the people it happens to, well, then it isn’t. The essential line of argumentative cunning running that owing to the fact that we have black prisoners, we have death. The quick breaths of hedgy administrators insisting: "They bring it with them and upon themselves - their demises residing in their very names".

            A figures game, a blinding math swath, a thick gum of trick sums.

For by these glum equations it is the prison building itself, its mixed bricks of quarried and stagger-stacked stone that groan beneath their ‘burden.’ The more abstract institutional structures likewise crowned as ‘laden down’ or ‘unduly encumbered’ by the numbers of ‘unreasonably sick’ and/or ‘inefficient’ persons whose residencies (involuntary as they may be) serve only to muck up and huck blemishes upon an otherwise flawless system.

This is the landscape the prison’s artful and awful charts try to forge;
                        a roaring engorgement of glowing self-images.


At Guantanamo, such strategic deployments of the crafted “self-destructive prisoner” image are rafted further still – the bureaucratic pages stuffed to fill with these imagined he’s or she’s who by utterly unprovoked acts of orneriness, mar and disable the system’s venerable stables. The chief doctor there actually declaring that all detainees who had strived, while writhing under an all prevailing surveillance, toward their own offings, were not depressed and more so had no cause for depression. The impact of little to no cellular release, of unceasing light and noise bombardment, of crippling restraints and physical assaults, of frequent visits to the vaults of torturous interrogation chambers were all regarded as negligible; if the prisoners were dispirited, it was merited that they had arrived that way. The resolutely non-confessional medical professionals were heard repeating these assertions publicly despite the reality that guards at GTMO are required to check each prisoner every two minutes in order to insure they are not trying to kill themselves, a practice that is remarked upon as “preserving their lives.”


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