Electric Torture: A Global History of a Torture Technology

Electric Torture: A Global History of a Torture Technology

Darius Rejali

Associate Professor of Political Science

Reed College

February 1999



Copyright (c) 1999 by Darius Rejali, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author at rejali@reed.edu.
​

In 1888, Thomas Edison endorsed the use of the electric chair to a New York State commission investigating alternatives modes of capital punishment. In 1890, New York electrocuted William Kemmler. In that same year, the Supreme Court rejected Kemmler's plea for an alternative mode of execution, determining that electrocution was not a cruel and unusual form of punishment under the US Constitution. Some were and are still concerned about how painlessly electricity could kill and under what conditions that might be considered torture. But what is important for my purposes is that at the dawn of the age of mass electrification, electricity was given a legal place in the context of punishment, and this would be portentous. The U.S. is the only country that uses electricity to kill, but it one of dozens that uses electric stun technology in the course of arrest, interrogation and incarceration. These devices are portable, discharge shock at the discretion of the officer, and the shock does not normally kill. Such devices find their roots back to the research and development that followed the first electric chair. In this paper, I simply sketch a lost history of a torture technology, investigating its invention and diffusion over the course of a century across the globe.

The penal use of shock long precedes the electric chair or for that matter electricity. Jailers used cold water to induce extreme shock and paralysis. Sing Sing prison was notorious for this, and, not surprisingly, when that practice disappears, one report indicates the presence of an electric shocking device in the 1890s. Policemen also turned to electricity to shock. The first device to be used to shock the criminal was light. Streets were lit because criminals feared the light, it was said. In Paris, prisoners were taken to the morgue where the electric lights were suddenly switched on, all this in the hopes of shocking the accused into a confession by confronting the body of the victim. Most notably, policemen started using the naked bulb in the course of interrogation, shining a bright light into the eyes of the suspect for hours. In three crucial decisions between 1935 and 1940, the US Supreme Court ruled that this use of electricity amounted to torture.

I list these precedents to identify what it takes to assemble these elements into what we now recognize as electric stun technology. Electricity first entered the process of interrogation in the 1920s in North Atlantic societies. It did so through the use of light and heat, not through electrical discharge directly to the body. However, electricity had already entered the penal process 30 years before, and here it was directly applied to the body. Electric charges could not be well controlled however, and minds bent towards determining what was the sufficient electrical discharge to kill someone instantly on the electric chair. But this knowledge falls short of what is required for the construction of electric stun technology, for the torturer needs to know something else: what is the maximal amount of shock and pain that I can deliver and yet allow the victim to live? To use electricity to stun, you must make sure it does not kill, and to know that, you must know how much electricity it takes to kill a human being. Moreover, the torturer requires a device that is flexible, that delivers electricity to the body at different points and that, ideally, is portable. The electric chair, by this criteria, was simply a very clunky apparatus. Cold watershock would be just as effective as the electric chair.

What we are looking for then is a device that applies shock directly to the prisoner, whose charge can be regulated as needed, that is portable and allows the torturer to apply the shock at his discretion to different parts of the body. Two devices, both in use in 1930s, have these characteristics: the Argentine picana electrica and the Italian invention of the Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) device.

The ECT device was invented in the early 1930s by Drs. Cerletti and Bini, two Italian psychologists who worked with schizophrenics. The device consisted of a voltmeter and a device for fractionating the electric charge into tenths of seconds. The shock carried was approximately the power needed to power a lightbulb, 100-150 volts. Bini provided the Roman Medical Academy with the full specifications in 1938, but was unable to patent such a simple device. Today there are six types of ECT devices that deliver between 109 and 135 volts.

But ECT devices are not the ancestors of electric stun devices. The shock they deliver is too paltry for one thing. These devices bear little relation to modern electric stun guns which deliver between 50,000-125,000 volts. The importance of ECT lies elsewhere in showing the limits of human tolerance of electricity. Unlike American electrocutioners, Cerletti wanted his patients to survive. Having killed a few dogs by experimentation, he was hesitant to use human models. In 1937, Cerletti's doubts vanished. He discovered that Roman slaughterhouses in the 1930s were slaughtering pigs through electrification. A day in the Roman slaughterhouses experimenting with pigs convinced him that in was by no means easy to kill a pig. Pigs could be electrocuted several times and revive after five or six minutes. Cerletti and Bini then applied ECT to schizophrenics. Cerletti's monograph was circulated in 1940 and by 1948, two English surgeons had developed the Page-Russel technique of applying powerful multiple shocks. By 1978, 100-200,000 patients were estimated to be treated annually in hospitals and asylums. Cerletti and Bini had shown how it was possible to provide maximal electric shock and for humans to survive.

The Argentine picana electrica has more humble origins. Developed in the stockyards of Argentina, this electrified cattleprod was probably put into service in the late 1920s and enters police work in 1932 in Buenos Aires. Europeans had used electric stunning in abattoirs from the turn of the century. In 1902, Boekelman had published papers on the electric stunning of animals for slaughter and its effects on the quality of the meat. By 1929, Weinberger and Muller developed a stun device for pig slaughterhouses at the University of Munich and became widespread for pigs, sheep and calves in the 1930s.

Using the picana on human beings was a two person operation, and it has not changed since the 1930s. Victims are strapped to a wooden table and wetted down to aid the current. The prod operator applies the wand to sensitive parts of the body (head, temples, mouth, genitalia, breasts, ) while the machine operator regulates the voltage. The victim usually bites on rubber or lead to make sure that the tongue is not bit off during the shocks. Usually, there is a doctor present to make sure that the victim has no heart problems, can survive the interrogation. Other accounts indicate a doctor keeps tabs on the pulse of the victim during the interrogation. The doctor also intervenes if that is necessary during the torture process.

The electrical picana operates on direct current, but it can be plugged into the wall socket of the victim's home with the aid of a transformer. It is transported in a suitcase and usually powered by an automobile battery. It is manned by two people. The first worked the bobbin raising and reducing the voltage. The other applied the electricity by applying a pole to the victim. The sleeve is insulated and the bronze or copper tip applied to the body. The voltage of the first picanas varied between 12000 and 16000 volts with a thousandth of an ampere. This voltage is modest by comparison to modern tasers that offer up to 200,000 volts, but it is the low amperage that is the key element. The low amperage allows repeated use of shock without killing the victim.

The picana electrica combines portability, flexibility and low amperage. In this sense, it qualifies as the first electric stun technology. It is however an invention that never found a market. There is no evidence that the picana electrica was used in any police force outside of Argentina until the 1970s. At this point, police in Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay also adopted it. But that is where the diffusion of this innovation stops. Oddly, the Chilean police under Pinochet, no strangers to electric torture, did not use the picana during the 1970s. In fact, between 1930 and 1960, no device similar to the picana was used for electric torture. This is not to say that electric torture did not happen. It is simply that other devices and innovations were involved.

The same cannot be said for Cerletti's device that very rapidly pressed into political service. The CIA expressed considerable interest in ECT devices. During World War II, a chief CIA psychologist advised John Foster Dulles that "each surviving German over the age of twelve should receive a short course of electroshock treatment to burn out any remaining vestige of Nazism." Pursuing the study of brainwashing, the CIA deliberated over the use of ECT for interrogation in the early 1950s investing some $100,000 in this area. It funded the work of Dr. Cameron in Montreal who used electroshock therapy to see if he could reprogram his patients in the late 1940s. Similar reports come from Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, where ECT devices were applied to prisoners without anesthesia. In 1966, CIA team arrived in Saigon to experiment on depatterning patients in the mental asylum and Viet Kong prisoners.

Yet, despite their diffusion, the use of ECT machines in police torture remains quite rare. There is some anecdotal evidence from Morocco and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But in general ECT machines are not the device of choice for electric torture. The machines don't deliver the necessary voltage and they are expensive.

Once again we have a false start, although one which has afforded us insight into how complicated it is to map innovation and diffusion of a single torture technology. We have on the one hand a device, the picana electrica, that is truly innovative but which does not spread and on the other hand, the ECT device that spread widely but is not used in police interrogations. But this false start has afforded us an insight as to where to look next. We are looking for a context in which electric stun technology like the picana is worked into police interrogation, one in which police from vastly different countries can learn from and adopt this technology in their interrogation process.

This context is French colonialism between 1945 and 1960 and the device in question is called a magneto or dynamo. It is a handcranked device that generates an electric charge. Dynamos are essential where electric outlets are not available. In the early twentieth century, they were used to trigger cars and field telephones. In Algeria, cars and field telephones were wired for electric torture. Two electric leads are connected to the a dynamo and their bare ends applied like hot needles to the most sensitive parts of the body. Alternatively two wires are wound around each ear or one around each ankle or one around a finger and the other around the penis.

Why was electric torture first used so broadly and systematically in Algeria and why did it spread so rapidly after that? Prior to the 1940s, many police forces used third degree methods and tortures to interrogate prisoners. The dynamo and magneto, the car battery and field telephone, were already available by World War I. Why then was electric torture not more frequently used? The reason lies in the quasi-democratic context in which the Algerian conflict developed. Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted. Such a technique was simply unnecessary for police forces that simply didn't care or in war contexts where it didn't matter or where there were no courts or presses to investigate the tortures. This is why we can find no record of Gestapo officers using electric torture for interrogation in Europe. Even among Gestapo allies, only one group, a small group of collaborators in Paris, experimented with electric torture. It also explains why we find few references to electric torture in the Soviet bloc.

In Algeria, it was otherwise. Here there were courts, journalists, human rights activists, left wing politicians, and theoretically, democracy. In fact, in 1955, the French government was obliged to send Wuillaume to Algeria to investigate the many allegations of torture. In his notorious report, he concludes that torture was being used extensively by the police for interrogation, and among the key forms it took was that of electric torture. Moreover, the use of electric torture had crossed over from the police to the French army, particularly the paratroopers in charge of civil order. Wuillaume argued that since the use of such devices was inevitable and so prevalent and the danger was so real and torture was so effective, torture should be systematized and administered professionally. Other sources confirm the use of electric torture by French colonial police. In 1949, a French journalist identified a magneto in a police office in Saigon which was introduced to him as a means of interrogating criminals. In 1961, prisoners in Poulo Condor, the main political prison in Vietnam, report extensive torture and fatalities due to electric torture. And in the early 1960s, electric torture was being applied to FLN supporters in Paris.

French colonial police and army then were the first disseminators of electric torture by dynamo worldwide. The methods they developed continued long after the last French soldier had left Vietnam and Algeria. Reports from Vietnam in the late 1960s indicate that both the devices and methods applied remained the same. US Marines sent to Vietnam stated repeatedly and independently that they were trained to use field telephones for interrogation in Camp Pendleton in the 1960s. The technique they learned was the French technique: "take a field telephone, the TP 3-12, and put the connecting wire to it, then take the other end of the wire and attach it to a persons testicles and crank it- this cuases a high-voltage shock, there is no amperage behind it, just voltage, but it is extremely painful." Once in Vietnam, marines learned a few variations in the attachment procedure, but the technique remained the same. By the late 1960s, virtually all police forces that used electric torture in interrogation were either former French colonies or had received extensive American training. The devices and methods used remain the same until the 1980s.

But we cannot leave the story there however much it is tempting to do so. For electric stun technology had other appeals besides its invisibility to public scrutiny. In democratic societies, the development of stun technology was advanced by many other concerns including an effort to find non-lethal forms of crowd control, concern for terrorism, and a growing sense of urban insecurity. Here, the trail left behind in the U.S. Patent Office is especially revealing, as the micro-developers of electric stun technology appealed to various concerns to market their innovations. While such material needs to be handled with care, certain general patterns are visible.

In the U.S., inventors had been patenting electric cattleprods from the beginning of the century. Between 1900 and 1950, inventors sought to make cattleprods lighter, more flexible to assemble, easier to handle and attached accessories, such as flashlights, to facilitate early morning roundups of cattle. In the 1940s, ten years after the Argentineans were using the picana electrica, the Americans also hit upon the idea of portable cattleprods. By the 1950s, the same devices were being patented but now they were characterized as non-lethal weapons. The first sketch for a taser design was patented in 1952. It was proposed for commando operations, to replace loud explosive gun fire. Domestic uses were also proposed such as an "Electrified Stick for Postman" (1964) or "Combined Policeman's Club and Restraining Device" (1960) By far the most common characterization however were those relating to police control of crowds. From the early 60s onwards, these devices were characterized as improved law enforcement batons or crowd control sticks. They were mounted as accessories on teargas fire arms to prevent rioters from wresting them from police. By the 1970s, however, inventors were trying new ways to market their devices. Now increasingly they were characterized as devices to ward off muggers and attackers. They were characterized as non-lethal self-defense devices, or multiple purpose defense batons. They were mounted on flashlights, walkmans, key chains and umbrellas. Finally in the 1990s, they were recharacterized for a new class of persons: not rioters or muggers but prisoners. One can find new characterizations such as "electric restraint weapon."

The patent record seems to be confirmed by various secondary sources although here the historical record is thin. It seems clear that Southern police were armed with electric stock prods in the 1950s and used these extensively during struggles with civil rights activists. A famous New York Times front page identifies Alabaman police charging demonstrators with electric batons and I have gathered some anecdotal evidence from civil rights activists confirm this, although it is interesting that none of the major historical studies of the civil rights movement can confirm this. In the 1960s and 1970s, various government commissions proposed more effective means of riot control, including electric stun batons. But the use of such weapons became unacceptable as people began making the connection between the batons and electric cattleprods. In the 1970s, electric stun technology took a new shape, stun guns and tasers. These were proposed as ways of demobilizing terrorists. They were particularly touted for airline safety since the guns could puncture the planes shell while tasers could immobilize terrorists at a distance. In fact, however, the primary market for these devices turned out to be not as airline safety devices but as personal safety devices. Interestingly, criminals also found electric stun technology useful for demobilizing their victims. In 1988, for example, Britain outlawed the manufacture, sale and use of electric shock batons because criminals began using them for bank robberies. Police forces quickly tried to establish a monopoly on these weapons. In the U.S. today, only police officers may use gunpowder powered electric tasers while in England, the use of the "Rambo", a baton that delivers 150,000 volts, is limited to individuals with special "Section 5" licenses. Nevertheless, airpowered tasers and stun guns are marketed widely in the US to this day as personal protection.

Because new patents always cite previous patents, the patent record allows for a few more observations. It would be a mistake to think that police stun technology is in some sense autonomous from the cattleprod. It seems that innovations move in both directions: a new kind of cattleprod is then used as the basis for a new kind of stun gun, a new kind of stun gun handle then is reused for a better stockprod. Further, morphology says nothing about genesis. That is to say, the same patent string can include prods, grips, canes, flashlights, forks, guns and batons. We would be missing a great deal if we followed only those devices that appear to have similar shapes through history. Finally, it is clear that by the 1980s, electric stun technology moved off shore. At the same time as the first Taiwanese patents are filed in the United States, by an interesting coincidence, electric stun technology begins to appear in Chinese labor camps as far away as Tibet. Human rights organizations also time the spread of this new kind of stun technology to the 1980s and 1990s. Today, in the 1990s, electric stun technology is an international industry. Patents from the U.S. and Taiwan cite patents in Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom and inventors of patents now seem to be agents for corporations rather than lone innovators.

I will pause here. This essay is in effect a progress report and a great deal still remains to be reconstructed. Let me move on to some conclusions. Torture involves three elements: torturers, procedures, and victims. We now know a great deal more about torturers and refugees who have suffered torture than we ever did, certainly more than two decades ago when I began working in this area. About procedures that characterize modern torture, we know next to nothing. My story has been an effort to capture historically three analytically distinct facets of the electric torture, that is, the devices used in the course of torture, the training required, and the ways of speaking that accompanied these devices. To write this story, I avoided large scale explanations for state violence or treated torture procedures as a systematic whole. I have deliberately stayed local and thought globally. I chose electric stun technology because it has advantages not afforded to many other kinds of torture: it is easily recognized in different accounts, its variations are identifiable, and its proximate origin, the invention of electricity, provides a manageable field of time and space across which to map it. Nevertheless, the same technique can be used to study other kinds of torture technology. At any rate, from my story, I now want to draw three observations for reflection.

First, the story of human torture cannot be conducted without the study of the torture of the insane and especially the study of animal torture. This is quite clearly illustrated in the story of the development of the ECT machine and the picana, neither of which were conceivable outside the enormous growing mass consumption of meat. The new demand for meat, made possible by greater purchasing power by average consumers, meant that new technology was developed for mass animal slaughter. In the 1930s, the electrification of meat was a controversial subject, especially regarding ham, and numerous scientific studies had to be conducted guaranteeing public safety. There is no question that Cerletti's work came right out of the Roman slaughterhouses and, although the connection between beef production and the electrical picana is circumstantial, I believe in time a more precise link will be found. And this is not the only place in this history where animals enter. The patent record also shows the interpolation of animal and human stun technology. Further, animal models were pivotal in illustrating the dangers of electric stun technology. This begins with Edison's friends who used dogs to illustrate the dangers of alternating current in the 1880s to the pigs currently used by the Center for Rehabilitation from Torture in Denmark to determine whether electric torture can be forensically identified. The latter, as some of you may know, has brought about protests by animal rights activists in Europe.

Second, electric stun technology says more about democratization that authoritarianism. Electric torture has no market in authoritarian states because there are no courts, activists, or politicians to which the police must answer for their violence. This is why the picana though it developed in Argentina, languishes there until the 1970s, when growing international human rights scrutiny motivated policemen to adopt the picana for torture in Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. This is why in an era of democratization, electric stun technology spreads so rapidly. Wherever we find electric stun technology, we find situations where police and military violence has been subjected to international and national democratic scrutiny. Here, electric stun technology is valued because it cannot be traced and perpetrators can easily deny it ever happened. The spread of electric torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where we are apt to link all evil things to globalization and all nice things to democratization, it is important to see that electric torture is more linked to the latter than the former. It arises and spreads as police forces reinvent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do democratic consumers increasingly fear for their security.

Third, I want to speak of our 'forgetfulness' regarding the nature of electric torture. There is a mythical story of the origin and diffusion of electric torture, endlessly repeated in movies, cheap novels, and uncritical accusations. Wherever electric torture is depicted in the popular imagination, in movies like Lethal Weapon or Rambo, electric torture belongs to evil forces such as the Gestapo, French Fascists, cruel US Marines, the KGB, the Viet Cong, or Latin American Fascists. There is another story of electric torture, one that is in the grey patent documents. It follows on the trail of various devices created for the convenience of a democratic public: for the consumption of meat, for personal safety in the dark, and for airline safety. It culminates in a range of 'acceptable' torture devices such as tasers and stun guns to be found in our everyday life. This forgetfulness seems much in evidence in the civil rights histories which don't note the growing use of electric stun technology. We all remember how badly Rodney King was beaten by L.A. police but no one remembers how many times King was shocked and how much voltage he received.

There are thus two stories of electric torture. The first story, what I shall call, the humanist story, find the origin of electric torture in a moment of unreason and evil, and sees its subsequent distribution as a matter of accident and self-interest. The second story, which I shall call, the naturalized story, finds the origin of electric torture in reason, and sees the development of tasers and stun guns as part of the inevitable march of technology. Neither is true, but notice how this 'dual origin' myth of electric torture allows ordinary people to, on the one hand, condemn the diffusion of electric torture instruments and on the other hand tolerate its everyday use in their communities. For what is especially important is that whenever a device is recast from one story into another, this has the effect of delegitimizing or relegitimizing its use.

The history of electric torture involves both history and technology, self-interest and reason, accident and necessity, nature and society, and the two narratives that seem so nicely separate, are in fact deeply interlinked. The democratic sense of public safety and the torture of animals or the use of stun guns in China are not in fact parts of different stories, requiring different books and different degrees. If we hope to put an end to electric torture, we must do more than simply put an end to sales to authoritarian states. We must confront the violence in our own societies and our own profound sense of insecurity that created the market for such things. Electric torture tells us more about our civilization that we would sometimes like to know.

 

oops