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| Utah corrections professionals help revamp police, prisons in Iraq |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 10/27/2003 |
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Two men with Utah ties have played a hand in helping reshape Iraq's prison system and in training Iraqi citizens to become police officers. Lane McCotter was part of a U.S. Justice Department-appointed 25-member team that visited various Iraqi prisons, determined what needed to be done to get them back up and running and then see that it happened. The team, which included former Utah Department of Corrections director Gary DeLand, was also charged with setting up a system to train Iraqi citizens to become police officers and run their own corrections system. Virtually every prison in the country had been destroyed after Saddam Hussein last October granted nationwide amnesty to Iraqi and other Arab prisoners, releasing tens of thousands of inmates. ''When we arrived, the prisons had been looted, burned and torn down, and all the prison records destroyed,'' said McCotter, who arrived in May for a four-month stint. ''It was almost like we were starting from scratch. They even stripped the copper wire out of the walls.'' Despite the setbacks, he said progress in renovating structures and installing a new corrections system has been remarkably fast and successful. At the end of September, five prisons were operational, with seven more expected to open by the end of the year. Several courthouses and police stations have been rehabilitated, and 35,000 Iraqi citizens are in training to become police officers and prison workers. McCotter said that training should be complete within a year. ''It's almost a miracle,'' he said. ''When I arrived, if you had said we'd have one (prison) up and running by the end of the year, I wouldn't have believed it. Now we have five and will have 12,000 prison beds ready for use by the end of the year. Japan took years to rebuild after World War II. They're expecting Iraq to be in the same place in months,'' he said. Of the 151 prisons the group located, 30 were targeted for rehabilitation. The rest were in such a state of ruin that it would be better to start over, McCotter said. He said most of the facilities were relatively normal buildings with plastered walls that would not pass for jails in the United States. But one, Abu Ghraib, Iraq's most notorious prison, was modeled after American jails built in the 1940s and 1950s and qualifies as a maximum-security facility. At Abu Ghraib, about 20 miles outside of Baghdad, and numerous other prisons, the team found ample evidence of the torture and executions that happened under Saddam's regime, he said. Abu Ghraib, which held up to 30,000 inmates at its peak, is known to locals as ''the place where people go in but don't come out,'' McCotter said. ''This was one of the cruelest, most corrupt prison systems on the face of the earth,'' McCotter said. ''There are torture rooms in almost every prison.'' The first wing of the revamped Abu Ghraib opened a week before he left to return to Utah, and the facility will accommodate 3,000 inmates. McCotter, who has served as director of the state corrections departments in Utah, Texas and New Mexico, was recently in Washington, D.C., where he briefed and trained others ready to pick up where his team left off. |
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