[Vision2020] The Brutality Connection: Abu Ghraib and America's Prisons

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Hail to the Vision:

This is my radio commentary on KRFP-92.5 FM for this week. This is second in a series of three that began with the death penalty and will finish with one on torture next week.

THE BRUTALITY CONNECTION: 
ABU GHRAIB AND AMERICA'S PRISONS

There are about 9 million people residing in prisons around the world.  With only one quarter of the world's population the U.S., Russia, and China have  half the world's inmates. Adjusted for population, the U.S. has highest incarceration rate in the world. 

Since 1997 the number of inmates in America's local jails has risen 4.3 percent, a rate of 1,000 each week. In 2002 there were 668 prisoners for every 100,000 Americans, while there were only 59 per 100,000 locked up in Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

America's prisons also have a shameful reputation for harsh and violent conditions. In 1999 charges of mock execution of prisoners in a Sacramento jail resulted in a successful class action suit against the sheriff.  In Arizona's Maricopa County jails the use of stun guns and restraint chairs, as well as forcing inmates to wear pink underwear, is standard procedure.

A training video for Texas' Barzoria County Detention Center encourages the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners. Recently U.S. Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith was found guilty for using unmuzzled dogs to threaten detainees at Abu Ghraib.  It is certainly not a coincidence that the CIA has learned that Muslim prisoners are particularly terrified of dogs and very protective of their masculine identities.

In January 2005, Army Specialist Charles Graner, one of the leaders in the abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners, was sentenced to a 10-year sentence. The 36-year-old former Marine used to work as a security guard at a supermax prison in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.  In 1998 12 officers at this facility lost their jobs after being charged with beating and sodomizing prisoners.  In a separate incident, an inmate filed a lawsuit (afterwards dismissed) that accused Graner of beating him. 

Lane McCotter was director of the Utah State Prison system when Michael Valent died after 16 hours in a restraint chair.  McCotter resigned his post, but six years later he was hired to rebuild Abu Ghraib, which President Bush promised would become a model prison.

There have also been increasing incidents of rape against new and weaker prisoners.  While overtly sexual, power rape is the prison bullies' way of maintaining their top male status and controlling those below them by humiliation and terror.  These assaults have nothing to do with the love that gay men share with one another.

The story of Roderick Johnson's experience at Texas' notorious Allred Unit is a dramatic example of this particular aspect of prison brutality.  As a gentle black gay man, Johnson was an easy target for top males who bought and sold him as a sex slave.  Johnson's repeatedly requests to be moved a safe unit were denied, and prison officials who did an internal investigation were surprised that a homosexual man would complain about having sex with other men.  Some American men still appear to be having a problem understanding consensual sex.

The most powerful political cartoon ever about our criminal justice system consists of a grid of boxes that symbolize years in prison.  Into the first box a big hand drops a person and closes the lid, and then after many years a rat jumps out the last box. 
 
Why do these horrific incidents happen only in the U.S. and other countries with bad reputations? Anne-Marie Cusac, who has investigated American prison conditions for the last ten years, argues that too many Americans harbor the same unfounded opinions: "People who land in jail deserve to be there; criminals are bad people—almost subhuman—who can't be rehabilitated; therefore, punishment can be as harsh as possible."

While governor of Texas President Bush presided over 198 executions, and in 1998 he rejected Karla Faye Tucker's passionate appeal for clemency.  Bush mocked her eloquent confession of how she had remade herself and others through her own prison ministry.  Americans must rise up and reject Bush's culture of fear, intimidation, and brutality that has made a once respected nation a pariah in the world.