Isn't there some famous quote about how incarceration damages the jailer as well as the jailed? This online comic on theglobalmail.org about one Australian's time working in a immigrant detention center is sharp little anecdote on that theme.

You can get a sense of its tone and style from the image above. Set on a stark white background, the words and images are spare except when they're knotty—like the story itself. In the end, you can understand the forces that push jailers to think of prisoners as "bad." To think of them as fully human equals while enforcing such strange and repressive conditions is stressful.

It reminds me of a conversation with former Seattle police chief Jim Pugel while he visited The Stranger's offices one afternoon—we talked about why so many officers live in the suburbs instead of the city and what effect this had on the way cops think about the city and its inhabitants. If the suburbs are "home" and the city is "work," and if your workplace mostly involves people who are having or are causing serious problems, you can't help but develop a hostile, us-vs.-them mentality.

Cops and jailers have to live in a strange contradiction—how do you "protect and serve" when your "clients" are also the problem?