Whether it’s Eliot Spitzer smugly commenting that New York’s state prisons have a ‘certain edge,’ or whether it’s comedians joking about the perils of penitentiary showers, one of the most striking aspects of the cruelty and degradation of the American prison system is the way that such abuse is, apparently, tolerated. Now we have yet another example of how this brutalization has been internalized by those charged with managing the system, this time from the California prison guards’ union. What triggered it? Well, to his credit, Governor Schwarzenegger is trying to restrain some of his state’s prison spending. The response from a union official?

“In the prison system, if you give in to a bully, you’re a punk. [The guards union] has never been a punk. I can’t say it any more clearly than that.”

What the official is also implicitly saying, in fact (as Matt Welch rightly points out over at Reason), is that the ‘punk’ (or, to use another word, rape victim), someone, incidentally, who his union members are meant to protect, is a creature beneath contempt.

Disgusting.

Prisoners, understandably, are often not individuals for whom the rest of America feels much sympathy, but, in a civilized society, humanity must not stop at the prison gate. And if a simple sense of decency is not enough to convince people of this, self-interest ought to do the trick. Brutalizing those who will one day be released back to live among the rest of us makes absolutely no sense at all.