Prisons in the USA

From Indymedia:

AMERICAN TORTURE CHAMBERS: A Report on Today’s Prisons & Jails, Part 1

by Kiilu Nyasha

(Originally written in 12/06, this report is just the tip of the iceberg. I've had to cut so much of the information I've gleaned doing the research into U.S. gulags to curb length. So this paper is just the first part of a series I'm pulling together. The next segment will focus on the history of U.S. prisons and the rise of the prison industrial complex. I'm hoping this series will be a wake-up call to the general public as well as the Movement that we must take action against the terror of a growing police state -- and fascism. Although written in 2006, the information herein is still valid and very likely an understatement of the current prison conditions since they've grown substantially worse five years beyond.)

The recently exposed tortures by American troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were part of a long history of prison brutalities in America’s torture chambers. In fact, among the torturers were prison guards transferred directly from U.S. prisons where similar tortures are inflicted on their captives.

The director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prisoner Project, Elizabeth Alexander, accused U.S. governments of honing torture tactics in American prisons before they were implemented in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “If you look at the iconic pictures from Abu Ghraib,’ she told reporters, “you can match up these photos with the same abuses at American prisons, each one of them." (CNS News.com)

Then there’s extraordinary “rendition,” the secret transfer of so-called terror suspects into the custody of other nations – including Egypt, Jordan and Syria – where physical and psychological tortures are used to gather intelligence, and to keep detainees away from any judicial oversight. (“USA Below the radar: Secret flights to torture and ‘disappearance,’” April 2006 Amnesty International)

American torture chambers necessarily include death rows. It is surely a torture to have impending execution hanging over one’s head for years on end. Just this month, at San Quentin -- where over 650 await state murder -- a death row prisoner committed suicide (S.F. Chronicle, 12/2/06).

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS),as of 2003, reported of over 3300 condemned prisoners, 267 had their death sentences overturned or removed, 60 percent from Illinois where the Governor commuted all 155 death sentences after learning of the innocence of a dozen or more prisoners slated for death

In a national study (Hayes and Rowan 1988) of 401 suicides that took place in U.S. jails in 1986—one of the largest studies of its kind—two out of every three people who committed suicide were being held in a control unit. In one year, 2005, a record 44 prisoners killed themselves in California prisons alone; 70 percent of those suicides occurred in segregation units (Thompson 2006).

From 1995 - 2000, the daily count of people in disciplinary segregation increased 68 percent -- a rate of growth more than double the growth rate of the prison population overall Some 80,000 people were confined in lockups, only a fraction of all those in high-security control units or supermax prisons. (BJS 1998, BJS 2004).

In the words of prison chaplain Sister Antonia Maguire, prisoners are treated like “animals, without souls, who deserve whatever they get.”

Endless stories of “appalling, sadistic treatment inside America’s own prisons” were uncovered during a four-month investigation, culminating in a video report titled, Torture Inc. America’s Brutal Prisons, produced for BBC Channel 4 last Spring. “Abu Ghraib...was simply the export of the worst practices that take place in the domestic prison system all the time.” 

I might infer that the wardens of prisons treat activists in the prison system worse than the inmates who cause problems and many look the other way with the bad inmates.  I used to joke about New York City being a maximum security prison, and that was from a movie called "Escape from New York"