by thecollective Jul 20, 2026
torture

There has been chatter about the situation with Prairieland inmate Maegan Morris, who, if I understand these details correctly, initially lied to the police, then was tortured, then cooperated with the police, then stopped cooperating, and finally was sentenced with the same punitive terms as those who did not cooperate at all. 

Others here have already addressed some of the issues raised (see last week's totw conversation), and the conversations specific to Morris are ongoing -- but this topic is less interested in any individual and more concerned with the following... 

1. How it's easy to be consumed by and give lots of attention to controversial situations, which means that the more obvious and clear collaborators, ironically, get less notice, and find it easier to re-enter our spaces.

2. Our assessments of what makes people break, or not, seems confused to me. Sleep deprivation, fear, lies, manipulation, these are things few of us have had to work through (at least not in combination). Training ourselves to deal with those things seems much more reality-based as a response to finding out that people have informed, rather than some blanket, generalized, and simplistic ostracization/violence. For example: I have long pondered the idea of a training program that bangs on doors in the middle of the night, pulls people from their beds, puts them under bright lights, and yells questions at them, as a trial-by-fire kind of process. This can teach people under what circumstances they will break, or can encourage tactics that allow them not to break. I can't imagine actually doing such role play, but I think it could be helpful, in an exigent sadist kind of way.

I think that we (very much including myself) have let us down, by not having more structured, regular, and challenging discussions about a) what it means (physically and emotionally) to be arrested, b) once arrested, how to resist (physically and emotionally), and c) stories from successful AND unsuccessful resistors. This is something that we can rectify in every bookfair, every @ conference, and in any political grouping we find ourselves in, since it is not an anarchist-specific concern.

So the questions:
I. What would you do to better the conversations we have about informants, and informants of various kinds? (Informants will have differing levels of collaboration, over varied periods of time, and differing reactions to having collaborated. How and when does that matter?)

II. What have you seen, read, heard, participated in that has treated the topic with depth and nuance? What were you the most surprised by? Corollary: What have you seen, read, heard, participated in that treated the topic in ways that you wish had been different? Why? What could you have done to make it better?

III. What is your assessment of what changes someone's behavior? What are you basing that assessment on? (Deterrence, which is what most people are claiming as rationale for blanket punishment of collaborators, is notoriously ineffective at changing people's behavior. Just ask the folks who fight the death penalty. What other ideas do we have?)
 

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SPEC OPS: THE LINE (not verified) Tue, 07/21/2026 - 08:49

No face, no case. Put your thinking caps on over your bally to find the way.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/21/2026 - 10:30

"Deterrence, which is what most people are claiming as rationale for blanket punishment of collaborators, is notoriously ineffective at changing people's behavior. "

That's a good subject, tho the level of deterrence anarchist networks have been showing was ridiculous compared to what you got with cartels, biker gangs, Jihadist groups, etc... where the inherent pressure of violence placed on snitches is much bigger. That's likely why you had brutal beheadings in Jihadist orgs and torture methods like salt sparkled on open wounds in some cartels... Extreme deterrence.

While it seems that in many cases the "snitches get stitches" slogan is rather empty, as those being snitched weren't up to the task of actual retaliative violence (not meaning vandalism or sabotage, but real actual bloody, painful violence upon agents). So at least, better just not be bragging with slogans at all?

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/22/2026 - 01:01

Was it the weather underground that would feed new members acid and tell them theyd kill them and their whole families if they snitched? Make that a bookfair workshop

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/22/2026 - 08:17

Hums... aren't ya confusing the WU with The Family?

Stiff recruitment policies and multileveled building of trust makes secret societies effective, while not requiring a lot of such deterrence. Systematic murder policies require a chain of command, that mafia-like formations have... but anarchist groups, unlikely to have (hierarchies?).

SPEC OPS: THE LINE (not verified) Wed, 07/22/2026 - 14:53

The WU mainly sold out and were riddled with spies.

Every anarcho group has hierarchies, there’s always at least one person more invested, has been in longer, informally has sway, is the thinker (in their own mind anyway). The Dispossessed has the best depiction of it. I’m skeptical it’s not just a fantasy like threesomes for vanilla white men.

invoke the 5th (not verified) Wed, 07/22/2026 - 06:54

“I invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, and I want an attorney.”
literally practice saying that until it's something you can say in your sleep. then if you're arrested and you're asked a question by the officer you can say “I invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, and I want an attorney.” and then, and this is important, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

DO NOT SAY ANOTHER WORD.

ANYTHING else you say revokes the invocation you just made and the cops will resume trying to pressure you into talking.

km (not verified) Wed, 07/22/2026 - 08:44

Having discussions about arrest, what that feels like emotionally and physically, strategies for dealing with arrest and detainment, etc, all this is needed. maybe just not in public?

the idea that we can train ourselves to better withstand torture by torturing ourselves first is, uh, let's say misguided.

I don't know that we would be able to ever have a foolproof method of withstanding police/state abuse that will work for all of us. I think it is good to neither underestimate nor overestimate our abilities in this arena.

it is also good to keep in mind - they cheat. they lie. they have no ethics they just want control. unless that too is our goal we would do well not to emulate their tactics.

km (not verified) Thu, 07/23/2026 - 09:09

yeah, I did not answer the prompts because that first bit threw me.

really, I have not had these convos as much as I would like. in general though, my feeling is we could be working out our personal shit better. so, instead of seeing how tough we can be by waking each other up and shining lights etc, we could be talking about interpersonal dynamics, or about how to support each other. I do not at all, at all, mean therapy! but, more like, getting to know strengths & weaknesses, how to care for each other beyond the demo we're at, or meeting we're attending.

maybe that all sounds mushy or soft, sure, and yet as allergic as @s are to it community building is a way to lessen snitching.
like, if you just meet a bunch of people to plan a thing for a month and that one asshole bugs you, maybe you don't have as much stamina for staying silent. but if you actually care about others and they care about you then it's a lot harder to turn on them, even the assholes.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/27/2026 - 08:25

I love this, I think the idea of getting to know people individually and identifying people's strengths and weaknesses... It is helpful to learn how to do that for other types of working together too. It sounds like just building genuine relationships with people.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/27/2026 - 08:43

yeah, you're kinda repeating the thing virga said about building home. but given that that is  running counter to the entire culture at the moment ), still pretty daunting. 

i don't think the prompt is saying to torture ourselves, but trying to look at the line between being realistic, encouraging people to understand the actual hardship, and training ourselves. that line is different for everyone and for the same people at different times, but the effort to at least talk about it seems worthwhile.

km (not verified) Mon, 07/27/2026 - 09:28

check the time stamps will ya okay.

and we can differ about what counts as torture yet banging on doors and shining lights sounds to me like the Stanford Prison Experiment except no one gets tenure. and it was not in the prompt per se, but in the preamble, so yeah....

and the discussion on the podcast was decent. and the sound quality was good for 2 of the 3 people so props for that!

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/23/2026 - 06:19

the prompt is not talking about reinventing the wheel. what conversations have you had that have been especially fruitful for this topic? when did you last have it? how would you motivate people you know and yourself  to talk about it again, more, because one time checking in is not enough (people change, people's circumstances change, the world changes)... and so on.

i'm going to be going to a free school class that talks about it. there will be readings about the green scare and other scenarios that have happened, and maybe some bright lights shined in people's faces while someone scary shouts at us. 

Cero (not verified) Thu, 07/23/2026 - 06:40

I understand what you're saying but I just don't agree. If you from the streets, you can hear the streets talk, you can't learn that in a textbook from some scholar. Maybe watch The Wire 🤷‍♂️

virga Thu, 07/23/2026 - 19:36

Nothing few of us have had to endure likely compares to what those being interrogated, tortured, and facing harsh sentences have been faced with, but perhaps there is value in willingly or semi-willingly (happenstance or orienting towards risk) doing things that are hard and with little enjoyment where all you want is to see the end of the situation. Perhaps there is value in reminding oneself of the temporality of such things, as a conditioning building block to something like facing years in prison. The cops will only try for so long if they start to realize they are going to get nothing from you, if one can make it through the initial shock and scare tactics. Maybe this can be where trying to live an integrated anarchist life is helpful, keeping beautiful ideas front of mind as a way to relate or imagine seemingly more mundane things in a far more extreme context, holding onto ones values.

All that said I don't think any amount of preparation can make one fully ready for the massive gut punch (figuratively or literally) of staring down years imprisonment. That doesn't mean there is not value in hardening and educating in advance. In my limited personal experience with jail, I was not psychologically prepared for the reality of the violence/assault I felt more likely to be targeted for than others at the time. In hindsight I was some amount naive and some amount over reacting to a cell assignment instead of finding the inner fortitude i wished i could have in the moment.

Looking back I am very much impressed by the work of @ lawyers, anti-repression groupings, and prisoner support formations. That feels like understatement. At the same time it feels like there are gaps that continue to pop up where one or more defendants gets some shit lawyer that ends up hurting peoples' cases. This is probably not 100 percent unavoidable in all cases, but new movement people understanding there can be large differences in outcomes based on lawyers knowing wtf they are dealing with or not seems like good prep. I have supported people that did time on based on bad advice from attorneys. Perhaps its akin to navigating the medical system, where one must be one's own advocate to attain the care they actually need. Arming oneself with knowledge ahead of time can help one to detect the bullshit or something feeling off that a lawyer is recommending.

The role play scenario mentioned in the prompt is intriguing but I wonder how possible it is to toy with the threshold of suspending disbelief and enacting The Anarchist Prisoner Experiment. Perhaps people with martial arts or role play experience in other settings can chime in on effectiveness. If nothing else, making the words invoking the right to silence a second nature muscle memory seems like it could be a useful link to cling to under terrible circumstances.

Years ago I read a pamphlet by a former political prisoner that had a lot on just the day to day to and what to expect as an anarchist or political prisoner locked up as far as prison politics and social things go that I found value in but I can't remember the title/author now. It also talked about the initial shock and feeling of getting a case. I think that doing prisoner support could be a helpful inoculation for new people. If nothing else reaching out to prisoners that didn't cooperate and asking them about their experiences and reading as much as one can on the topic, memoirs, and so forth.

Last thing I will say that comes up for me is the importance of not just security culture type of things but developing an anarchist culture that people don't want to betray, not because of or at least only because of negative reinforcement (threat of violence), but because it feels like home. Tall order...

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/24/2026 - 19:12

An old school individualist anarchist here who doesn't have a name on this site, though I've frequented this site often in the last 18 yrs, and received alot of abuse and verbal torture from the site stalwarks and admin.
We purist anarchs don't have a snitching problem, COS WE ANARCH ALONE! Our victories against the corporatist/capitalist hegemony are our own, from within its foul machinary we make every day a revolution against moralities, systemic mind control, authoritarian conformity and futile binary critiques which drain our creative energies and instead, express our radical stillness with mindblowing and literal poetry of humungus revoltionary significance, to our immediate social contacts ;)

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/30/2026 - 17:12

Yes, we are deep, and why we can sometimes attract the scorn of authority when combined with satire. Marcel Marceau, Chaplin, Keating, Carlin, Bruce, to mention a few.
But the 18 yrs of visiting this site have been rewarding. *Trump impersonator clown slipping on banana peel*

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 08/02/2026 - 04:38

George carlin? Who literally told people to be happy with what they have and never expect anything to change? Told people to never organize together, definitely never advocated any sort of illegalism or rebellion. The guy who acted in Hollywood movies and made millions of dollars off that message is your anarchist hero?

Congrats on being mentally ill enough to convince yourself you're free without changing any of the conditions that led you to originally conclude you weren't free.

SPEC OPS: THE LINE (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 02:49

Clowns were the only lower class role to have sway with protected powers in the court. There is a direct correlation between unimaginative dismissiveness and tired praxis but you'll never get it.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/30/2026 - 04:40

Funny this person's defenders are using the term "torture" the same way radlibs do "abuse."

Was she given electric shocks and sodomized or was she "tortured" the way every person accused of a serious felony conspiracy is? My guess is the latter but she's using the term torture in order to manipulate people into acting like it was the former.

Its very clear what happened from the documents. She freaked out, was mad at song and blamed him, and snitched.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/30/2026 - 07:24

nice that we're gatekeeping torture now. 

another perspective is that people who are arrested are all tortured, and to have more compassion. not saying that we don't respond to people who have informed, but so much punitive vengeful language and attitudes for folks who are ALSO having a hard time seems both ineffective and to some extent self-hating.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 07:55

Some "gatekeeping" is required, sorry. These words actually mean something. The reason we don't want that word being used in this context is because otherwise it stops holding any kind of weight or meaning. It demeans the experience of people who are ACTUALLY being tortured for real, usually in 3rd world countries like Egypt for example where torture is part for the course so you can fuck off with your super privileged lily white LARPing ass.

Omg did they yell at you and keep you sitting in a chair all night? Oh no! Did they deprive you your Starbucks and the use of your TikTok device? SOMEONE CALL THE UN!

Oh and PS, fuck a snitch.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 08:41

your comment is a classic. like sure, definitions for words are important but gatekeeping as an actual bad practice, not just a pejorative, is exactly what you're doing. 

first you exoticise torture as something that happens only to other people in distant places, as if cops and the state are not torturing people wherever you are and wherever i am every minute of every day, and then you trivialize what happened to morris as if you know exactly what she went through. then you make assumptions about who and what i am, as if, even if you were right, that means i can't have or understand the significance of the issue. 

this kind of punitive, shallow response makes us dumber. stop trying to make us dumber.  

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 09:51

"usually in 3rd world countries like Egypt for example where torture is part for the course so you can fuck off with your super privileged lily white LARPing ass."

Oh ain't that lovely... so because the torture's happening in a White-dominated cuntry, when any decrying of torture happening is therefore void, coz *checks notes* it's "super privileged lily white LARPing ass". Therefore torture's more acceptable if it's not happening in a 3rd world cuntry (which the US is becoming anyways). Good to know, FIFA normie scum!

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 10:00

Good to know that's your personal kink! But this is Anews and there's a solid consensus here around hating defenders of state torture, *regardless of WHERE it happens". So please fuck off and die, lapdog.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 15:43

You're the one making excuses for a literal snitch but IM the lapdog?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH !!!!!!!!!!!!

And no btw, Morris was not "tortured". Being sat in a chair all night, with a light in your face getting yelled at IS NOT torture, you soft motherfucker.

You wanna know about torture? How about you look into how ISIS treated their prisoners, or what Cartels do to people who have information they want. Do I really need to spell it out?

They rape you. They cut off pieces of your body. They rape and kill your loved ones while making you watch.

Want me to paint more of these pretty pictures for you?

So shut your fucking mouth about shit you know nothing about you ridiculous north American LARPer POS and stop making excuses for actual snitches who fold and betray their friends over the (as described in the OP) MILDEST most vanilla concept of "torture" possible. Morris is a snitch and you, her lapdog apologist.

The End.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 16:17

while rejecting pretty much everything you're saying, i wonder if you, 15:43--Caller-out of LARPers and Definer of Reality-- are capable of considering that someone doing something bad doesn't mean that other things are not also happening. 

do you believe that any effort to consider various perspectives and possibilities is always inevitably an apology? 

maybe you can only think about one thing at a time...

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 18:13

Are you capable of articulating why you reject any of the above? No?

Gtfo then.

Yes, "two bad things" can happen at the same time. So? My point is there are LEVELS to this shit. If anything the cops are probably under strict orders NOT to rough these people up too badly. Im sure behind closed doors some supervisor is probably like, "ok on one hand we need to interrogate these people but at the same time we need to handle these white uppermiddleclass brats carefully bc their rich parents can sue." And honestly wtf is this right here?

"do you believe that any effort to consider various perspectives and possibilities is always inevitably an apology?"

That sounds like a lot of verbal gymnastics for rationalizing snitching. Would you extend that same courtesy if this was a dude or does this person get a pass bc woman/idpol? Also btw: snitching, then "taking it back" (lol) only to end up just as fucked as the people who stayed strong is both hilarious and sad.

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/01/2026 - 06:41

what do we care about what the cops' orders were? that's a non sequitor. (also, you think that torture only happens when the orderers say it's ok? lol)

and you thinking that the sentence you cite involves verbal gymnastics certainly indicates what level of conversation you're comfortable with. 

as does the idea that other people here are paying as much attention to morris' gender as you are. 

you're a mess, son. maybe f.d. signifier is more your speed than an anarchist site. just a thought.  

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/31/2026 - 21:17

"Being sat in a chair all night, with a light in your face getting yelled at IS NOT torture, you soft motherfucker."

Yes that is, bootlicker. That is called "psychological torture", and also includes forced sleep deprivation, which has physical consequences.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 08/02/2026 - 04:43

Ok but then clearly not all torture is created equal, and she was not subject to the level or torture that would justify this sort of snitching. Its irrelevant too if you read the actual documents it didn't take hours for her to start talking she was talking during the initial traffic stop.

I don't get it does this person just have a lot of scene clout? She buddies with some crimethinc folks or something? This is unforgivable shit.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 08/02/2026 - 08:40

the idea that a conversation about what to expect from people we're at an action with, how we prepare them and ourselves, what we want to do in response to them doing something bad, what it means to focus on edge cases (which nathan bauman for example is NOT) and basically ignore more obvious offenders, and how to even have conversations ABOUT the conversation-- that is what this prompt is about. 

some people not being able to talk about any part that is not the hot new name/circumstance is absolutely part of the problem. 

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/01/2026 - 23:43

"initially lied to the police, then was tortured, then cooperated with the police, then stopped cooperating, and finally was sentenced with the same punitive terms as those who did not cooperate at all"

My understanding was that she initially cooperated, naming names. Went back for a second round of cooperating with the prosecution, then when it seemed obvious she was going to get time, she backed out of cooperating so she could get prisoner support. Seems like she's a snitch who later regretted it when it didn't work out how she had hoped. If I'm wrong, could someone provide evidence that she lied, and then only cooperated under duress?

We don't ostracize snitches because of some desire for deterrence, (although this may be an upside) but because they have broken trust with their comrades and with anti-authoritarian movements/milieus. Do they deserve prison? No. Do they deserve prisoner support resources? Maybe not, especially not if it would take away from non-cooperating individuals who have not broken trust.

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