[News] An Ugly Prison Record

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Published on Monday, May 10, 2004 by the <http://www.thestar.com>Toronto Star
An Ugly Prison Record
Given the Way it Treats its own Inmates, America Shouldn't be Shocked at 
the Abuse of Iraqis
by Christopher Reed


For a nation founded on slavery and genocide, Americans retain an 
astonishingly enduring faith in their continuing righteousness. They are 
sounding this note again as the prison torture scandal continues in Iraq.

In a column in the New York Times last week, Middle East analyst Thomas 
Friedman warned that the revelations created the "danger of losing America 
as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world."

Does he not read the world's newspapers? Uncle Sam as moral authority?

Other U.S. pundits similarly harrumphed about America's endangered 
integrity and leadership. President George W. Bush himself said the prison 
mistreatments were not the American way.

But they were, and they are.

Friedman's column was headlined, "Restoring our honor," but the abuse of 
prisoners surprises nobody who reads newspapers or scans the Internet. 
Americans have been mistreating and torturing their fellow Americans in 
their own lock-ups for decades. What honor is there to restore?

In "liberal" California, horror stories have appeared for years from 
hellholes such as Pelican Bay prison, where they house "the worst of the 
worst" ­ and also inflict the worst brutalities. A prisoner dumped in 
scalding water so his skin peeled off like old varnish; prisoners left 
naked outside in rainy and bitter weather for days; multiple beatings and 
rapes; several unexplained deaths.

In Corcoran prison, California, guards held their own Roman gladiator games 
with prisoners pitted against each other in fights to the near death. A 
disliked and defenseless prisoner was placed in the same cell as the 
biggest and baddest sex criminal ­ known as the Booty Bandit ­ to be duly 
raped to the amusement of the prisoner's supposed guardians.

Pelican Bay is such a fearful place, with prisoners kept under perpetual 
scrutiny while unable to see any other human being, a psychiatrist told a 
court that many were going insane.

A federal judge finally ordered reforms, as did another over Corcoran, but 
there is little evidence that either have become proper places even to 
house the worst.

Similar reports surface across America. Texas is especially bad.

Significantly, private, for-profit prisons have some of the worst records.

They often have such poor medical facilities that prisoners die from 
curable conditions, as Harper's magazine revealed in an exhaustive inquiry 
last year.

California holds more prisoners than Britain, France, Germany, and Canada 
combined, yet jails are still grossly overcrowded. Conditions in many 
southern U.S. prisons resemble some of the worst of the developing world, 
with prisoners sleeping on filthy floors overrun by rats.

In 1999, it was reported that 13 women at California's state-run Chowchilla 
female detention center had died the previous year from negligent, or 
non-existent, medical care. Amnesty International reported in 1999 that 
male guards in several U.S. states routinely raped female prisoners.

In a book published in 2001, Going Up The River, former Wall Street Journal 
reporter Joseph Hallinan told of visiting a prison in Alabama where chained 
inmates still broke boulders with sledgehammers.

The sheriff of Phoenix, Ariz. was re-elected by loyal voters after bringing 
in female convict chain gangs. All this has been going on since Saddam 
Hussein was a young man.

It has worsened in recent years, despite a massive prison-building program 
that now incarcerates 2 million, the world's largest prison population.

Yet Americans have mostly ignored the disgrace of their penal system.

They became so fearful of crime, they lost consideration for the lives of 
criminals. Any idea of rehabilitation has been abandoned. Even when 
scandals over mistreatment do emerge, many say the inmates deserve it.

This does not excuse commentators such as Friedman, or the shocked, 
shocked, demeanor of U.S. news anchors and commentators.

Yet the details from Iraq itself support the view that prisoner abuse in 
Iraq was inevitable.

At Abu Ghraib prison, the alleged main perpetrator is staff sergeant Ivan 
"Chip" Frederick, 37, the senior of six non-officers charged with cruelty 
and other mistreatment. He is a part-time military policeman called up last 
year for service in Baghdad ­ and was a prison guard for six years in 
Virginia.

Another reflection on the role of private enterprise in U.S. incarceration 
is the background of Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, also a military 
police reservist in Iraq.

When she was put in command of Abu Ghraib and its thousands of Iraqi 
inmates last year, she had never done penal work before. In the army she 
was an intelligence officer and in private life, a business consultant.

Shortly before her suspension from duty she told a Florida newspaper that 
her prisoners were living so well, she was worried they wouldn't want to 
return home.

Another American living in dreamland.

Christopher Reed is a Los Angeles-based reporter who has written 
extensively on prison conditions in the United States.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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