Abuse Common in U.S. Prisons, Activists Say

[NNN0LHI]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040506/us_nm/iraq_abuse_prisons_dc&cid=1896&ncid=1473

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Horrific abuses, some similar to those revealed in Iraq (news - web sites), regularly occur in U.S. prisons with little national attention or public outrage, human rights activists said on Thursday.


"We certainly see many of the same kinds of things here in the United States, including sexual assaults and the abuse of prisoners, against both men and women," said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the national prison project of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites).


"This office has been involved in cases in which prisoners have been raped by guards and humiliated but we don't talk about it much in America and we certainly don't hear the president expressing outrage," she said.


President Bush (news - web sites) has said he was disgusted by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Yet, there were many cases of abuse in Texas when he served as governor from 1995 to 2000.


For example, in September 1996, guards at the Brazoria County jail in Texas staged a drug raid on inmates that was videotaped for training purposes.


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[KoKo]

1. Two of the Guards in this article were involved in Iraq Torture Scandal!

(This is really starting to hit the fan. Who connected the dots on this? It's awfully fast to see this kind of connection being made by our lazy press)

Two of those allegedly involved in the abuse of Iraqis were U.S. prison guards. Spc. Charles Graner, who appears in some of the most lurid photographs, was a guard at Greene County State Correctional Institution, one of Pennsylvania's top security death row prisons. Two years after he arrived at Greene, the prison was at the center of an abuse scandal in which guards routinely beat and humiliated prisoners.

Prison officials have declined to say whether Graner had been disciplined in that case.

Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick was a corrections officer at Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia. In a statement published by the Richmond Times Dispatch on Thursday, Frederick compared his role at Abu Ghraib in Iraq with his job as a guard in Buckingham, where he said he had "very strict policies and procedures as to how to handle any given situation."

In Iraq, he said, there were no such policies.

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Sadly this has been true

for a very long time. Most white middle class Americans have no clue what really goes on right in here in our own country on a daily basis. Some of it is as bad and even worse as what we have seen in the pictures from Iraq. Go ask any black person. Most of them can tell you at least a couple of horror stories.

[R Hickey]

3. Exporting Amerika's prison culture.

The Bush family is pro-prison. Bush Sr has had a lot to do with Wackenhut Prisons over the years, and helped found the company. At Wackenhut, they always know where there tennants are, and the government always pays the rent on time.

I believe Texas has the biggest state prison system in America. They take in non-violent prisoners from other states for profit. The prisoners are treated like in Iraq, so no wonder Bush has turned a blind eye so long.

Since Reagan took office, our non-violent prison population has grown exponentially, til now our prison system is the biggest on earth, outstripping the growth of America's universities many times over.

The Republican 'Pot War' has been a huge success from the standpoint of locking people up. At least America is number one on something.

[icymist]

4. Some MP's guarding Iraqis were employed in the US prison system

before enlisting in the army. They had to learn that they could get away with this type of behavior from somewhere. We need to investigate our entire prison system.