Out of the West Wing and into Cellblock D

When the London terrorist bombings pushed everything else out of the news last week, it looked like Judith Miller had been locked up and forgotten. Granted, that’s not so unusual. The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country: For every 100 U.S. residents, there are about five prison inmates, yet the cable news shows rarely waste airtime pondering their fate.

But now that spin master Karl Rove has spun himself into his own web, attention has shifted back to the Rove/Valerie Plame/Miller case. So let’s reflect again on Miller’s imprisonment.

Though I think Miller got her ethics upside down when she refused to testify to the Plame grand jury, at least Miller, unlike Rove, has a backbone. Although Rove had no problem yakking away to journalists about classified information when it helped smear his political opponents, today he’s hiding behind his lawyer in the apparent hope that keeping mum will save his hide. Contrast that with Miller, who knew that keeping mum meant accepting jail as the price of principle and chose it anyway.

Whatever one thinks of Miller, it takes courage to court jail time in a country infamous for its egregious prison conditions. Prison abuses in the U.S. run the gamut from the routinely humiliating to the appallingly brutal. In California women’s prisons, for instance, male guards conduct pat-down searches that at times degenerate into no-holds-barred groping. Meanwhile, at Virginia’s Red Onion “super-max” federal prison, inmates committing minor rule infractions were often held for so long in restraints that they were forced to urinate on themselves, according to a 2000 report from Human Rights Watch.

That’s just the small stuff. Beatings and other forms of physical abuse are rampant at many U.S. prisons. At a state prison in Texas, prison board members entertained themselves in 1989 by using inmates as live quarry for tracking dogs, according to the Austin American-Statesman; a decade later, a federal judge noted that Texas prisons remained marred by a “culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” An estimated one in 10 male prisoners in the United States has been raped in prison, and Human Rights Watch reports that in some facilities as many as one in four female inmates has been sexually assaulted -- often by prison staff.

Miller is luckier than most prisoners, of course. She’s not in a super-max facility but in a so-called new generation jail in Virginia, designed as a more “modern and humane” lockup with extensive recreational and educational facilities. And it’s a safe bet that despite official denials, guards have been instructed to keep the nation’s most famous journalist safe and well. Miller herself reported last week that the prison staff was “extremely professional and very courteous.”

Still, Miller’s not on vacation, and she may find, as others have before her, that time in prison changes one’s priorities. In 1993, for instance, Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, spent 11 months in a federal jail for harassing his onetime mistress. Wachtler, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ultimately wrote a book contrasting the cavalier assumptions judges make about prisons with the harsh and degrading reality of strip searches and solitary confinement. Since his release, Wachtler has been a powerful advocate for prisoners and the mentally ill.

Perhaps Miller too will someday write about her time in jail. She could shine a valuable spotlight on the abuses that continue to mar our prison system.

And Rove? Ironically, it was judge-turned-inmate Wachtler who first quipped, shortly after becoming chief judge, that a grand jury would “indict a ham sandwich.” (Expect to hear this a lot if the Plame grand jury issues any indictments.) Rove is certainly porky enough to qualify, and if the special prosecutor’s investigation is focusing on perjury and obstruction of justice as well as potential violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he could well end up as lunchmeat this time around.

If he does, the gods will chuckle. Rove was an architect of former President Bush’s vitriolic 1988 campaign ads attacking Michael Dukakis for giving inmates “weekend passes to get out of prison”; in 1994 he used nearly identical tactics to win the Texas governor’s mansion for George W. Bush, vilifying Democrat Ann Richards as soft on crime.

And of course, Rove has never shed any tears for prominent Democrats when they found themselves in the hot seat. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Rove ridiculed Al Gore for describing his fundraising visit to a Buddhist temple as a “mistake.”

“These aren’t mistakes,” Rove told reporters indignantly. He accused Gore of wanting “to pass this off as a minor little boo-boo. It isn’t. It’s potential violations of law ... with people going to jail.”

Uh huh. I’ll look forward to reading Rove’s prison journal.