It is tempting to presume that sadists and zealots typically commit torture. Sometimes, they do. But American torturers have often insisted that their actions were altogether appropriate, morally justifiable, and in the best interest of their community.In Chapter Two readers encounter earnest prison reformers during the first half of the nineteenth century who condoned methods of physical and mental punishment that they believed would rehabilitate incarcerated criminals. At some acclaimed prisons, for instance, a policy of perpetual isolation and silence prevailed. Prisoners lived for years with minimal contact or conversation with others. Advocates of this policy contended that it encouraged introspection that was the first step to rehabilitation. But other contemporaries countered that 24/7 isolation was a form of psychic torture that transformed inmates into mental wrecks. These critics advocated instead forms of harsh physical punishment, including whippings and simulated drownings (similar in effect to waterboarding), as apt methods for promoting the rehabilitation and obedience of prisoners.While many of the forms of discipline were variations on time-honored techniques familiar in early modern Europe, the sites where nineteenth century prisoners experienced violence were wholly modern. Proponents vouched that any acute suffering that prisoners endured when subjected to simulated drowning or from weeks confined in complete darkness and silence were never by design. Prison reformers may have been sincere in their hope to redeem the nation’s criminals, but they designed and defended prison practices that perpetuated in a modern democratic society the state’s continued assault on the criminal’s body.I intended the book to be a call for vigilance. America’s leaders, or those who act on our behalf, possess no innate moral or ethical lodestar that predisposes them to respect human dignity or rights. To the contrary, the American political system rests on the recognition that Americans, like all other human beings, have the capacity, even the inclination, to abuse power. The oft-repeated claim that the United States is a “nation of laws” is a concise expression of the Founders’ aspiration to channel and temper the exercise of power with rules, procedures, and constraints. Yet despite the Founders’ fear of an oppressive government, the nation’s democratic institutions and traditions have proved far more hospitable to torture than many Americans assume.Bedrock elements of American democracy have arguably both fostered torture and hindered efforts to curtail it. Dispersed authority across multiple layers of local, state, and federal government along with the tradition of popular democracy and localism may have protected citizens from the tyranny of the national government. But that same decentralized power gave license to countless legal and self-declared agents of the state to wield the power of petty despots. Consequently, Americans should be vigilant against abuses of power in all severely hierarchical state institutions or wherever extreme inequality have been tolerated, even defended, in the name of the public good, tradition, or a consequence of human nature.