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<h5><b>May 17,
2004</b></h5><font size=3><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/opinion/17MON1.html?pagewanted=print&position" eudora="autourl">http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/opinion/17MON1.html?pagewanted=print&position</a>=<br><br>
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</font><h2><b>The Dark Side of America</b></h2><font size=3>The sickening
pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led
inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the
corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30
years and now jails people at eight times the rate of France and six
times the rate of Canada. Conditions vary widely from state to state and
community to community. But as The Times's Fox Butterfield reported
recently, some of the chilling pictures from Iraq such as the ones of
inmates being paraded around naked could have been taken at some
American prisons. And humiliation by prison guards is far from the first
thing on most American inmates' list of worries.<br><br>
The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each
year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and
prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of
tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common
problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees and used by
inmates who share needles have made prison a high-risk setting for
H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis
C.<br><br>
Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than
risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at
bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will
unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public
health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new
epidemics down the line.<br><br>
It is hard to quantify how many American prisoners are abused, or allowed
to suffer from untreated illnesses, since the system operates largely in
the shadows, outside public scrutiny. The maze of federal, state and
local institutions defies easy assessment. <br><br>
Things are more transparent in Europe, thanks to a powerful, independent
prison commission, informally known as the Committee for Prevention of
Torture. Established in 1987, The C.P.T. has unlimited access to places
of detention, including prisons, juvenile centers, psychiatric hospitals
and police station holding areas. Human rights violations including
medical problems quickly become public. Such a system is long overdue
in the United States.<br><br>
The need for such a body was underscored last year, when Congress passed
the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ordering the Justice Department to
collect data on this serious problem and to create a mechanism for
dealing with it. Prison officials predictably play down rape as a
problem, but a harrowing report from Human Rights Watch suggested that
prisoner-on-prisoner rape accompanied by savage violence was commonplace,
and that officials often looked the other way.<br><br>
Psychiatric care for psychotic inmates is poor to nonexistent. A recent
study by the Correctional Association of New York found that nearly a
quarter of inmates assigned to disciplinary lockdown confined to small
cells 23 hours a day were mentally ill. Their symptoms worsened in
isolation; nearly half had tried to commit suicide. Dissociated and
sometimes violent, these people are dumped onto the streets when they
finish their sentences.<br><br>
The prison system can no longer be seen as the province of prison
officials who cover up or mismanage problems that eventually come back to
haunt the rest of the society. The country needs to formulate national
prison standards and create an independent body that enforces them, if
only by opening prisons to greater public scrutiny.<br><br>
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