Seems the BBC has a series coming out on US prison brutality -- not in Guantanmo, or Abu Ghraib, but in normal US prisons. I remember when the first Abu Ghraib pictures came out, I posted on BOP, an article entitled something along the lines of "US Finally Treats Iraqis Just Like Americans!" The BBC provides examples:

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

Now none of this stuff is unusual in the world, or in world history. When I googled for "prison brutality", Uzbekistan came up right along with the US on the first page.

Uzbekistan...

See, the thing is that what happened in Abu Ghraib and Guantanmo is not surprising. It is the export of civilian practices in prisons into the military. Maybe it goes slightly further, but it doesn't go that much further. The US attitude towards towards convicts (and indeed, even towards people accused but not actually convicted) is that they deserve whatever they get.

My response to this is to say "fine. If you think they deserve to be raped and tortured, put it back on the books. Have the judges say, you John Smith, are hereby found guilty of snorting some cocaine. You are sentenced to 5 years in prison, and you shall be raped no less than five times. Electricity shall be applied to your testicles on no less than three occasions. You will be strapped to a metal restraint for no less than 3 days, at least 10 times and forced to defecate upon yourself for the duration. You will also spend at least 3 months in solitary. Be greatful that we are not making you pay your debt to society by releasing the hounds on you, sir, that we will spare you, since you were involved in no violence".

But in many jurisdictions of the US, the judge might as well be, because many of those things will happen to prisoners. You send a certain type of man or woman (pretty, not tough or connected) to a maximum security prison and the odds of them being raped are so close to 100% that there is no effective difference.

And it's this casual contempt, not for the rights of other humans, but for their essential humanity; this inability to put ourselves in anothers shoes, to treat even the worst (and many are far from the worst) among us with dignity, respect and reasonable kindness and forebearance which the US has displayed to the world. The world, rightly, is disgusted and the effect has been a real loss of American prestige. These things aren't just niceties; aren't just frills - a decent respect for humanity buys you a lot of leverage; buys you respect, helps you get your way. Those who preach about democracy, human rights and freedom are expected to live up to those words.

These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any ‘use of force operation’, such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush’s commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.

Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S. politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.

‘I thought: “What hypocrisy,” Carlson told me. ‘Because they know we do it here every day.’

All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared Carlson’s belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of a few rogue individuals, was simply the export of the worst practices that take place in the domestic prison system all the time. They pointed to the mountain of files stacked on their desks, on the floor, in their office corridors – endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment inside America’s own prisons.

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

But for every ‘historical’ tape we collected, we also found a more recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

The "tough man macho" bullshit has got to stop. It doesn't mean being strong, it means being a bully. The US blows into countries it thinks it can beat, but tiptoes around places like North Korea who could bloody its nose. Prison guards beat prisoners who have no way of fighting back, who are nobodies and helpless, then cover it up. People make jokes about rape all the time (an indication that they fear it), but no one does a thing about it. Meanwhile the US locks up more people per capita than any other nation in the world - beating out totalitarian states like China.

The entire process has been largely privatized, with prisoners held to make a profit. Entire rural communities have as their primary industry a local prison. To put it crudely, white rural men get paid to lock up urban black men. The industry is so powerful that no one wants to take it on - not just because the corporations have influence, but because the prison guard unions will savage any politician who suggests reform of either the prisons themselves, or the insane system of laws which has lead to such a massive prison population.

As with so much in the US, everyone with any sense (which means a lot less people than one would hope) knows this is FUBAR, but because people are making so much money for doing work that shouldn't even be needed (like the 20% to 30% administrative overheads in health insurnace companies) no one deals with it.

And so people suffer; people are raped; people die - all because some greedy people want to make money off the public teat doing what they enjoy - abusing blacks and poor whites who get caught up in the system.

One of the few good things that can be said about the oncoming collaps of the US economy is that it's going to force people to look really closely at things like this and decide if they're really willing to pay billions and billions for a system like this.

Addendum courtesy of Tina. For the record, I don't think this matters much. A man may be a mass murderer, I still don't believe in torturing him. Something about not becoming a monster yourself. However, for the record:

"Contrary to the public perception that the incarceration of violent offenders has driven America's prison growth, the [Justice Policy] Institute found that 77% of the growth in intake to America's state and federal prisons. between 1978 and 1996 was accounted for by nonviolent offenders. According to data collected by the United States Justice Department, from 1978 to 1996, the number of violent offenders entering our nation's prisons doubled (from 43,733 to 98,672 inmates); the number of nonviolent offenders tripled (from 83,721 to 261,796 inmates) and the number of drug offenders increased seven-fold (from 14,241 to 114,071 inmates). Justice Department surveys show that 52.7% of state prison inmates, 73.7% of jail inmates, and 87.6% of federal inmates were imprisoned for offenses which involved neither harm, nor the threat of harm, to a victim. Based on this data, we estimate that by the end of 1998, there were 440,088 nonviolent jail inmates, 639,280 nonviolent state prison inmates, and 106,090 nonviolent federal prisoners locked up in America, for a total 1,185,458 nonviolent prisoners." To read the report by Daniel Maccallair entitled America's One-Million Nonviolent Prisoners, where from this quote was taken, click here.

http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/00342/The%20Prison%20System.html

lso:
http://prorev.com/2007/10/sorry-facts-on-us-prisons.html