by William F. Schulz [The following essay appeared in The New York Review of Books, April 24, 1997] 1.
During a break in his trial on charges of assault, Edward Valdez walked out of the San Diego courtroom into the hallway where jurors were standing around waiting. Suddenly he screamed and crashed to the floor. "He was out for about a minute," said the prosecutor. "It was very effective."
What the prosecutor was praising, the cause of Valdez's sudden collapse, was the accidental discharge of an electronic shock belt, popularly called a stun belt, which the defendant had chosen to wear under his clothing rather than appear in handcuffs and chains before the jury. Stun belts deliver 50,000-volt shocks to the left kidney, which fan out from there through blood channels and nerve pathways. Shocks can be administered by guards from a distance of 300 feet simply by the push of a button. This is one of the reasons why stun belts are so popular with police and correctional officials, especially those who oversee the increasing number of chain gangs and don't want to get near their prisoners to incapacitate them.
And incapacitate the belts surely do. An eight-second application of shock inevitably knocks a person to the ground and may induce urination, defecation, or unconsciousness. Manufacturers promote them as nonlethal alternatives to guns because they allegedly allow for effective control of prisoners without inflicting lasting damage. That is a major reason why the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided in 1994 to use stun belts in medium- and high-security lockups. Since then dozens of state and county officials have purchased them.
The stun belt is only one of the latest in a series of devices using electric shock that have been manufactured in the United States to provide law enforcement officials with what is advertised as a safe, convenient means of controlling and transporting prisoners. Stun guns, shock batons, electric shields, some of them using up to 250,000 volts on low amperage--these and many similar devices are becoming more and more commonplace in sheriffs' offices and prison guard stations across the country.
Unlike the traditional electric cattle prod, which causes intense localized pain, stun weapons are designed to temporarily incapacitate a person, inflicting agonizing pain throughout the body in a matter of sec6nds. One of the most popular; the Taser, which fires electrified darts connected to a wire, was first tested in 1969 by John H. Cover, Jr., and later became famous when it was used against Rodney King. Of those early tests, which he performed on himself, Cover says, "I . . . immediately knew that I had found what I was looking for--an electric shock that was harmless in terms of not killing or injuring--but made you 'TAKE NOTICE'--it was a MOOD Changer!!"1 According to Cover, the National Rifle Association and "small arms gun lobby groups," apparently fearing Tasers would displace guns, tried to put the manufacturer out of business after it began marketing its product in 1975. With support from such satisfied customers as the Los Angeles Police Department (which had discovered that, among other things, shock batons took people on PCP "off their high" immediately) kept the company thriving.
As of 1995, though stun guns were reported to be illegal in Illinois, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and in some municipalities, they were used in many other states, including Oklahoma, Arizona, Florida, and Iowa, as well as by the federal government. At least forty US companies manufacture shock devices and not a few of them sell them overseas. While not alone in the market, the United States has a corner on the business. 2.
One of the most prominent of those US companies is Stun Tech of Cleveland, Ohio, manufacturers of the popular electronic shock belt called R-EA-C-T (for Remote Electronically Activated Control Technology). Stun Tech's basic information packet describes the name choice: For every action there is a R-EA-C-Tion--basic physics. Therefore, activation of the belt would only be in response to a violent act, a choice made by the individual wearing the belt and acted upon by the attending control officer.2
The emphasis on the limited uses to which such a device should be put reflects Stun Tech's tacit recognition that it is peddling a product that could easily be used irresponsibly; it states, for example, that it will not sell belts without buyers participating in an in-depth training program. "Note," the packet announces in bold print, "Any use of the R-E-A-C-T belt system for officer gratification, inmate punishment, torture or interrogation will result in criminal charges against that officer or agent." But how Stun Tech would ever know about such misapplication or find itself in a position to press charges against such "officers or agents" is hard to imagine. Dennis Kaufman, president of the company, recently said that he has sold some 1,100 stun belts to US law enforcement agencies, including 300 to the federal government;3 he has acknowledged, however, that Stun Tech does no research on the prison systems to which it sells its products.4
If Stun Tech pays lip service to restraint, its other promotional statements make a point of its belt's crueler uses. One of the great advantages, the company says, is its capacity to humiliate its wearer. "After all, if you were wearing a contraption around your waist that by the mere push of a button in someone else's hand could make you defecate or urinate yourself," the brochure asks, "what would that do to you from the psychological standpoint?" And if the shock ever has to be administered? "One word," brags the brochure, "DEVASTATION!"
The stun belt causes this result with only a one-second delay between the activation of the device by a guard and the onset of the eight-second shock. No doubt the brevity of the delay time helps to explain why the belt has been unintentionally activated by officials nine times. This was the result, Kaufman says, of operator errors, and after such errors were publicized, the company felt it had to install a switch guard on its belts so that the person controlling the belt could not casually flip on current. But no switch guard can offset the fact that the 50,000 volts can be administered in eight-second segments as frequently as the operator chooses; and no switch guard can mitigate the apparent propensity of human beings to inflict gratuitous pain upon their fellows--particularly if they can do so from a distance. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese