Close Down Guantanamo? What About Our Own Hellholes



by Sherwood Ross

www.opednews.com

From Florida to California, America’s dehumanizing prisons confront 
President Obama and our governors with a challenge every bit as 
daunting as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

  In California, the state’s 33 adult prisons teem with nearly double 
the inmates they were designed to hold,” The New York Times reports. 
In Florida, officials say they must build 19 more prisons over the 
next five years.

  In both states, advocacy groups would rather see non-violent 
prisoners nearing the end of their sentences released early than 
build more new bunks. Barney Bishop, president of the influential 
business lobby Associated Industries of Florida, has released a 
position paper calling for a halt to the scheduled construction of 
three new, 1,300-bed prisons at a cost of $300 million. “It doesn’t 
make sense to me,” Bishop told the Miami Herald.

  Florida has got 99,000 inmates behind bars and it will have an 
estimated 124,000 in the slammer by 2014. The figure is skyrocketing 
because “get tough” politicians voted in mandatory minimum sentences 
and mandatory life terms so that, in the words of Bill Bales, a 
criminology professor at Florida State University, “there is no 
release valve available, unlike in states that have parole.” 
Mandatory sentences may also discourage prisoners from trying to get 
time off for good behavior.

“Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes, 
including minor drug offenses,” The Times noted in an editorial last 
January 1st. In Hawaii, an estimated 30 percent of prisoners have 
been doing time on such charges. In an editorial last January 1, The 
Times noted, “although it has less than 5 percent of the world’s 
population, it(the U.S.) has almost one-quarter of the world’s 
prisoners. And for the first time in history, more than 1 in 100 
American adults are behind bars.”

There are grim signs those who run our prisons at all levels have 
lost their grip on their jobs. In California, health conditions in 
the prisons are so bad they are currently in the hands of a federal 
receiver, who said the state needs to spend $8 billion to rehab its 
old prisons and build new ones.

“Overcrowding is dangerous for the prisoners, for the corrections 
officers and for the public,” said Michael Bien, a California lawyer 
for the inmates who asked Federal District Court judges to reduce the 
prison population by 52,000 over the next two years by early paroles 
of non-violent offenders.

Mocking the concept that our prisons are "country clubs," one Federal 
inmate wrote in the Honolulu Weekly, “Can you imagine a country club 
where 130 snoring, stinking, farting guys sleep stacked on bunk beds 
arranged not even two feet apart in a tiny little dormitory and then 
stand in line in the morning to use one of six toilets, which are 
only rarely in working order at the same time?”

According to Human Rights Watch, mistreatment of prisoners is 
practically a tradition. In 1995, a federal judge found a stunning 
pattern of staff assaults, abusive use of electronic stun device 
guns, beatings, and brutality at Pelican Bay Prison in California, 
and concluded the violence “appears to be open, acknowledges, 
tolerated and sometimes expressly approved” by high ranking 
corrections officials. Another federal judge four years later 
concluded that Texas prisons were pervaded by a “culture of sadistic 
and malicious violence.”

“In recent years, U.S. prison inmates have been beaten with fists and 
batons, stomped on, kicked, shot, stunned with electronic devices, 
doused with chemical sprays, choked, and slammed face first onto 
concrete floors by the officers whose job it is to guard them,” HRW 
says.

What’s more, many prisoners are dumped into numbing solitary 
confinement not because of any infraction against prison rules but 
owing to their political views. As one man who experienced this wrote 
in the Socialist Worker last year: “There is no way to articulate the 
excruciating torture of sensory deprivation. Picture living in a 
cage, about the size of a bathroom. You are there 23 hours a day, day 
in and day out, year in and year out. You are allowed one hour a day 
out in a cage the size of a tiny living room. You are allowed one 
five-minute phone call every six months, which is monitored. Your 
mail and reading material is maliciously scrutinized and censored. 
When leaving your cage, you are subjected to a dehumanizing strip 
search which includes a genital and anal probe, and then handcuffed. 
You are completely under the control of prison guards who carry 
pepper gas and long, black batons that some refer to as "spic and n-
word beaters."

That’s one inmate’s perspective. Yet an overview report titled 
“Rights For All” by Amnesty International found: “Some prisoners are 
abused by other inmates, and guards fail to protect them. Others are 
assaulted by the guards themselves. Women and men are subjected to 
sexual, as well as physical, abuse. Overcrowded and underfunded 
prisons, many of them privatized, control inmates by isolating them 
for long periods and by using methods of restraint that are cruel, 
degrading and sometimes life-threatening. Victims include pregnant 
women, the mentally ill and even children.” And the Justice 
Department itself reported four years ago that sexual assaults on 
inmates is a "significant problem"in federal prisons.

Indeed, U.S. prisons have a long and tragic history of punishing 
innocent individuals. Historian Howard Zinn recalls that during World 
War One conscientious objectors in prisons were tied up and subjected 
to a form of what we today would call waterboarding.

Senator Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat and former Navy Secretary 
under President Reagan, has called for a national commission to probe 
the U.S. prison system. This is an urgent matter, particularly as the 
Bush regime outsourced a goodly fraction of the job to contractors 
Wackenhut and Correctional Corporation of America.

The last thing this country needs, though, is another study of our 
prison system if it will only gather dust in bookcases on Capitol 
Hill. We need to take the profit out of prisons, beginning with the 
liberation of all inmates jailed on marijuana charges. (Note: I am 
not a user.)

Too often, our jails are seen as money-making opportunities for those 
in charge. In Decatur, Ala., according to a published report, the 
sheriff fed prisoners on $1.75 a day, and pocketed the change, 
salting away $212,000 over the past three years while his charges 
went hungry and lost weight. Every prisoner helps create jobs and 
money-making opportunities for such sheriffs, as well as wardens, 
guards, social workers, psychiatrists, judges, bail bondsmen, etc.--- 
not the kind of jobs you would boast about in a democracy.

Perhaps if USA had cleaned up its deplorable prisons at home it would 
not be exporting them globally. It could not be charged with being 
The World’s Jailer. There are likely few abuses inflicted on Muslims 
in a Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib that haven’t been first tried in USA. 
It is ludicrous and hypocritical for a White House to claim it is 
exporting democracy while it ignores the abuse of its own imprisoned.

As Tom Paine once opined on this subject: “When it shall be said in 
any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor 
distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, 
my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not 
oppressive’--- when these things can be said then may that country 
boast of its constitution and its government.” Folks, we gotta ways 
to go.

# (Sherwood Ross formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and the 
Miami Herald. He currently heads a public relations firm for non-
profit organizations, book publishers, and good causes. Reach him at 
sherwoodr1@yahoo.com).

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Sherwood-Ross-090321-680.html