In Sympathy With Paris Hilton - No, Really!

Poor Paris Hilton!  Well, not so poor ... she is an heiress.  The natural instinct is to distance ourselves from such gilded butterflies and feel little compassion when they get pinned to the board of life by the public's insatiable demand for entertainment.  After all, she is in her mid-twenties and not some vulnerable teenager - and she brought it on herself.  And yet the nasty little incident surrounding Paris might be considered to be much more serious in its implications than we think.  Let us recap with the facts.

Paris Hilton (who needs no introduction) broke the law.  Perhaps she thought she was above it - or just has a brain that can't remember things like a reckless driving sentence.  Reckless driving is a serious matter.  It is not just that she is at risk herself but she could kill someone else.  The laws have a purpose.  The law had every right to demand that the punishment go to the next stage beyond probation, education and a small fine to something more salutory.  Even the harsh 45 days is not what it seems - a state good behaviour law means that it should be 23 days if she keeps her nose clean.

But the circus surrounding her case has been disturbing, not for the usual reason given that it shows a celebrity culture out of control but because it has taken a celebrity's apparently a-social behaviour to show what a sink-pit we have in the Western prison system.  The British system is not much better than the US.  We close our eyes to these overcrowded abominations much as we close our eyes to the abattoir, the crematorium, the sink housing estate, the true nature of war, the conditions of asylum seekers, many of our care homes and so much else that is not glamorous.

So, glamour now enters the sink pit.  Now we see the sink pit for what it is - thanks, in the UK, to the somewhat graphic account by the BBC of what the Century Regional Detention Centre is actually like.  Let us see what this girl went through, according to the reputable Forbes magazine - http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/10/ap3805741.html  She is clearly in a state of extreme distress: "Hilton, in tears and screaming for her mother, was taken to the downtown Twin Towers facility Friday afternoon ..."  The local Sheriff had referred to an an "unspecified medical condition" which was clearly interpreted as "psychological".  He added that "she had arrived at her original jail with a condition he hadn't been apprised of and that it immediately began to deteriorate to the point that he feared for her safety".  She is, in short, highly vulnerable.

Reading between the lines, the Hilton team are desperately trying to get this unhappy and disturbed girl into conditions that are far more humane than the dreadful human pig pen that we have seen on television. Hilton herself (apparently) asks (quite reasonably) 'that the public and media focus on "more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq".  This rather suggests that the lawyers have worked out that the greatest blocks to that move are the political opinions of the authoritarian republican Right.  Now she is "at a maximum-security detention center, where she was believed to be undergoing medical and psychiatric evaluations to determine the best jail to keep her in as she serves the rest of her sentence."

And this is where it gets really disturbing.  Even if we accept that the woman has done wrong and that the community must take action to express its concern, deter and correct (if not punish), it is clear that she is psychologically vulnerable.  The prison process, on the other hand, seems to depend on creating high levels of psychological stress.  We see levels of cruelty that may be acceptable in the nation that turns a blind eye to Guantanamo Bay but levels that should be deemed ethically unacceptable in any truly civilised society.

Because she is a 'celebrity' (more than because she is rich), she now has entire teams of people worrying about how to 'triangulate' traditional American righteousness with the fact that the whole world is seeing this cruelty played out in public.  The problem is that poor Paris is not alone - thousands of young males and females, who have lost their bearings, breach laws that are randomly policed and where policing is targeted at the under-class.  American egalitarianism dare not say that these thousands are less valued than Paris Hilton yet they have been treated like social prisoners of war rather than as troubled fellow citizens for decades.  Now that a gilded beauty has been captured for the killing bottle, the system is briefly open to public gaze. 

Western prisons are often vile and unsanitary, the atmosphere inside them cruel and brutal, the professionals overworked and increasingly cynical - the dustbins of massive social failure across the West.  This poor girl is now in a lose/lose situation.  If the system fails to recognise her misery (the level of cruelty seems now to far exceed the requirements of the reckless driving crime), it is because to do so might require a re-think on cruelty perpetrated daily on thousands of young people that society cannot otherwise control.  The system cannot afford to admit that it is involved in a crime to defeat crime.  If so, she is stuck in hell for another three weeks or so. 

But if the system treats her exceptionally, even by recognising her 'mental illness' as a special case, a sort of 'depression brought on by adverse conditions in the context of wealth and high status', then it is tantamount to saying that good lawyers and money can always buy a way out of a system fixed against the poor.  Of course, the system usually arranges a 'fudge' in these cases - she will be incarcerated but the mental condition will be used as an excuse for the sort of round the clock care that no one from the underclass would dream of getting.  In the end, like a latter day Winston Smith, Paris admits her guilt, pledges to reform and the system will claim that justice works - as in 1984, there will be no one around to say otherwise.

What no American commentator seems capable of asking is what sort of culture is it that thinks that freedom for the many can only be bought at the expense of a systematic programme of cruelty directed at the most vulnerable in society - whether rich or poor.  This is not a class point.  Paris needs care too - in fact, at some time in our lives, we all do.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am no bleeding heart liberal.  I am persuaded that prison works in the sense that there are hardened communities of criminality that are taken off the streets through the prison system.  However, effective social control (let's call it what it is) also requires reducing the pool in which criminality can swim, not only through sensible security but through investment (yes, that is the word) in marginal and vulnerable communities.  It also means not taking vulnerable kids who are repeat offenders and then assuming that they are criminals, offering them nothing but cruelty in debased conditions.

The Western prison system is an abattoir for the human spirit - a growing social gulag designed to deal with the consequences of our inability to think in terms of the communal and the collective.  This social collapse has more to do with material conditions than the moral rot much preferred by the right-wing as analysis.  No, I am not at all saying that criminality is necessarily a matter of poverty (any more than terrorism) but that is another analysis for another day.  I am only saying that criminality expands with social anomie and social anomie is linked to the way our material culture is structured.

This Autumn, I understand, a campaign is on the way to raise mental health and 'happiness' higher up the British political agenda.  It is led from the New Labour centre-right and it is to the discredit of those to their Left that they failed to lead in this area.  However, if anyone thinks that greater happiness will come from yet more moral exhortation and rhetoric in the New Labour tradition, then they are deluding themselves.  It is not for the State to promote happiness but it is for the State to enter into the process of reducing misery - dealing with poor material conditions and exploitation, providing access to mental healthcare services and maintaining a much more aggressive approach to improving and limiting the scope of our mental abattoirs.

So, I really do feel compassion for Paris Hilton.  If she was bright and compassionate enough herself and could get away from the grip of her lawyers, the experience should turn her into a socialist.  It probably won't, of course.  She'll probably do something similar to what Naomi Campbell and Emily Parr and all the other 'celebrity' victims of the public's righteous indignation have done - adjust to prevailing public opinion, express regret, intend to turn over a new leaf, be watched like a hawk by the minders, use the publicity to re-build public awareness, trade on the notoreity, have fun to make up for the bad times.  And why not?  That is how it works now.  Best of luck to them.

Meanwhile, deep inside the sink pit, I bet there are other young women, somewhere between 18 and 30, in a state of extreme distress "in tears and screaming for [their] mother" with an "unspecified medical condition" who will not get the attention of specialists and who will be left to bleed out their souls unnoticed and uncared for by a callous public and a cynical judicial system.  Don't sleep easy at night until you know just how wrong this is ...