Torture or not torture?

It’s a fun guessing game, figuring out exactly what constitutes torture these days. I’m actually relatively sympathetic to John Schwenkler’s point that you don’t need to make prisoners uncomfortable when segregating them from the rest of the prison population. Of course you don’t need to; you do it specifically to make them uncomfortable and teach them that there are consequences for for being a hazard to the prisoners, the guards, and themselves.

But being uncomfortable for a couple of hours does not constitute torture. If it did, half of the prisons in this country would be shut down. Month-long stretches of solitary confinement happen all the time in prisons; I would argue that those punishments are far more deleterious to the mental health of inmates than sitting for (up to) 12 hours in a box big enough to sit down (albeit kind of uncomfortably) in.

But this is where we are in the debate: anything that makes a prisoner at Guantanamo kind of uncomfortable is now torture. Excuse me for finding this mildly absurd.