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| Corrections experts, inmates say prisoner abuse common |
| By Join Together |
| Published: 05/17/2004 |
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Correction officials, inmates, and human-rights advocates said mistreatment of prisoners similar to the physical and sexual abuse uncovered in Iraq is common in U.S. prisons, the New York Times reported May 8. According to corrections experts, in Pennsylvania and other states it is a practice to strip inmates in front of other prisoners before moving them to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are forced to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation. In Virginia's Wallens Ridge Maximum Security prison, new prisoners are forced to wear black hoods to prevent them from spitting on officers, and many inmates are beaten, cursed at by officers, and made to crawl. Some of the worst past abuses took place in Texas, where prison officers allowed inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex. The prison has since been put under a federal consent decree because of the violence and overcrowding. According to Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, which promotes alternatives to incarceration, over the past 25 years more than 40 state prison systems nationwide were placed under some form of court order because of brutality, crowding, poor food, or lack of medical care. Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in Washington State and Colorado and currently a prison consultant based near Seattle, said, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time." He said problems in prisons have been compounded by overcrowding, which has caused a need to hire large numbers of inexperienced and often times undertrained officers. "Retention is a big problem and so unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or captains in a few months," said Riveland. Riveland suggested that a similar situation might have occurred in Iraq, where the U.S. tried to start a new prison system with undertrained military-police officers from Army Reserve units. |
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