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satt comments on Crime and punishment - Less Wrong
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This is entirely correct. But we hide it because we think it's wrong. The condition of our prisons is due more to extremely powerful guard unions and other general incompetence than it is due to an affirmative desire to make prisoner's lives miserable.
Unless you're saying we do have some covert policy of torturing prisoners. That may be true across some extremely limited scope, and it's done purely as a means to an end. I don't think there's much of a case for saying that we deliberately and gratuitously torture prisoners as an intentional part of their punishment, which was my point.
Eh...
We have a fairly strong taboo to the effect that government should stop at the prisoner's skin. However, there are a lot of ways of making people acutely miserable without breaking the taboo.
I don't think it's a bad taboo-- it's better than overtly mutilating people, I think.
Torture and Democracy is a history and analysis of no-marks torture, and concludes that no-marks torture is generally a result of monitoring by human rights groups.
I second Torture and Democracy's analysis; it's a great, if very long and very depressing, book.