[News] The Dark Side of America

[News at freedomarchives.org]

May 17, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/opinion/17MON1.html?pagewanted=print&position=



The Dark Side of America

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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