All of those correctional cadets from the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation Basic Training Class 18 who were photographed apparently giving a Nazi salute will be fired, thanks to the decision by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice to approve a recommendation from an internal report on the incident.
"We have a lot of good people in the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety," Justice said in a statement. "But this incident was completely unacceptable."
He said three staff members at the training academy will be fired. And four instructors who did not report the photograph will be suspended without pay.
Two trainers and a cadet were canned earlier, while 34 others were suspended without pay during the investigation of the photo, which was released Dec. 5 (with faces blurred) by the state's Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. Some cadets said that they were ordered to raise their arm in a salute to a training instructor for their class identified only as "Instructor Byrd."
Byrd told a member of the secretarial staff, according to the investigation by the department and its Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, to caption the photo "Hail Byrd," "because I'm a hard-ass like Hitler."
There are two threads worth pulling apart here. First is the most obvious one: the glorification of Nazi violence. Hitler wasn't a "hard-ass;" he was a genocidal dictator who ordered and oversaw some of the worst atrocities in modern history (he was also, as most tyrants are, a pathetic and fearful little man). Hitler and his Nazis killed some 6 million Jews, and millions of others: people with disabilities, Roma people, gay people and those who dared stand up to him.
That's not a "hard-ass." That's a vicious, murderous anti-Semite and a man so vile it's hard to come up with appropriately derogatory descriptors. To encourage cadets to think of you like Hitler and, by extension, of themselves like Nazis? That's poison.
Anti-Semitism remains pervasive in the United States and around the world, surfacing in atrocities such as the stabbings carried out in Monsey, New York, last weekend. According to the New York Police Department and the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise.
So good riddance to all of these Nazi-saluting cadets.
But there's something else here, too. If the cadets are gesturing like Nazis -- glorifying their obedience to a "hard-ass" leader, who exactly are they all collectively terrorizing? Nazis, after all, are menacing only because they have blameless, helpless victims.
These cadets were training to work in West Virginia's prisons, jails and juvenile correctional facilities. Correctional cadets are already entering a field where abuse is rife and where a sadistic streak of authoritarianism can too often be allowed to flourish.
West Virginia is 93% white, but, according to data from the advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative, nearly a third of its prisoners are black. Hispanic people are also over-represented in West Virginia correctional facilities. Prison guards have been accused of rape and other assaults in West Virginia prisons.
The treatment of prison populations, including children, is at the whim of corrections officers. Rogue guards have been known across the country to abuse their power and act with tremendous brutality toward inmates --too often effectively protected from punishment by union rules.
Within this larger context, this incident suggests the problem likely doesn't begin and end with these cadets, who, predictably, say they were just following orders -- in this case, from Instructor Byrd.
Firing everyone involved is the correct first step, but it can't be the last one. The West Virginia Department of Corrections needs an expansive investigation into the culture that made this photo seem like an acceptable idea in the first place -- however clueless the adult cadets claim to have been.
What else are cadets learning about their role supervising and keeping safe the incarcerated population? How are working guards treating the incarcerated? Are people in prison being kept safe in West Virginia, or is the tolerance for cruelty that this photo arguably suggests already being leveraged against people with few avenues for reporting, and who stand to pay a steep price for speaking out?
The cabinet secretary of West Virginia's Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety and the commissioner of the department's Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation both recommended additional training, though neither was specific.
The photo was an ugly symbol of a murderous ideology. But firing the people who raised their arms in a Nazi salute does not root out any of the potential underlying rot among those in positions of authority over future key players in America's justice system. West Virginia needs to dig deeper to find what's festering underneath.
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