I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan. I have read every book in the series numerous times, and I'm the kind of person who gets really upset when people ask stupid questions or discredit the story after only having seen the movies.
Currently, I am in the process of reading the entire series to my unborn child with the hopes that he will be born already loving Harry and the entire cast of wizard characters. Right now, we are partway through "The Goblet of Fire," and I've noticed a few things this time around that I had never really thought about before.
For example, why didn't witches and wizards simply apparate away from the dangers presented by the Death Eaters when Lord Voldemort was at large? How was Hermione allowed to have a time turner in order to get to all of her lessons in "The Prisoner of Azkaban" without Professor Snape being aware of the situation? (If Snape had known, he would have known for sure that Hermione and Harry had had something to do with Sirius Black's escape, rather than simply suspecting them.) Why, if Harry is inextricably linked to Voldemort, does he sometimes see Voldemort's actions in his dreams, but from the point of view of a third party?
All of these questions are unanswerable and not particularly important. However, there is one thing that really bothers me. We all know that the Wizarding World is not always the most progressive or fair place. It's a terrible place for good hearted werewolves like Remus Lupin, Mud Bloods are often discriminated against, and society is constantly on the brink of civil war due to the potential rise of Voldemort. However, even in a flawed society such as this one, how the fuck is a terrible place like Azkaban allowed to be the ONLY wizarding prison?
For those who are not familiar with Azkaban Prison, allow me to briefly explain. Azkaban is where literally every wizard or witch convicted of any crime, regardless of severity, is sent. This prison is guarded by creatures called dementors who feed off of the happiness of human beings and make it really cold all the time. When they are around, nobody is capable of feeling happy. After even a short amount of time, the vast majority of prisoners is driven certifiably insane by the dementors' presence. Even wrongly convicted wizards often loose their will to live while in Azkaban.
Oh, and if they get pissed off or if you do something really bad, they suck the soul out of your body and leave you, a miserable meat shell, to live out the rest of your life without really living.
This shit would never fly in any developed country in the Muggle World. First of all, America is the only first world country that even allows capital punishment anymore. So you'd better bet that England, where Harry Potter is set, would have a serious problem with this whole soul-sucking scenario. Even in America, where frying up and lethally injecting murderers is quite popular in some places, safe guards are put in place in order to protect prisoners from terrible things like dementors.
The eighth amendment to the American constitution forbids what is termed "cruel and unusual punishment" for convicted criminals. There has been extensive debate since the drafting of this amendment as to what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, as one might expect. However, psychological punishment is fairly widely considered to fall into the category of constitutionally prohibited.
In fact, on several occasions judges have ruled against allowing capital punishment convictions to stand on the grounds that housing a prisoner while he knows that the time of his death is quickly approaching can be considered cruel and/or unusual. How much worse is allowing prisoners to be stored in a place where they are incapable of having happy feelings? Where it is always cold? Where they are constantly being emotionally drained by the creatures guarding them while all the while living in fear of literally losing their souls?
And the Wizarding World does not reserve this punishment for the worst criminals. As far as one can tell from the content of the seven books in the Harry Potter series, all convicted criminals are stored in Azkaban. Hagrid, an innocent man, was sent to Azkaban for a time in "The Chamber of Secrets" after it was wrongly assumed that he had opened the Chamber. As far as I can tell, he didn't even stand trial! The wizarding justice system is allowing the psychological torture of prisoners to the point of insanity without even giving them due process first.
There are gross violations of basic human rights going on in Harry Potter's world. Sometimes I wish I lived there so I could play quidditch and use magic to do my chores, but I'm not sure I feel that way anymore. Who wants to live in a world where, the next time they get busted for disorderly conduct, they have to go through holding in a place where the prison guards might suck our their soul? Not me. Not Anymore.
