Racial disparities in incarceration by state

May 30, 2004

Our sponsor, the Prison Policy Initiative has prepared 239 graphs suitable for reuse by activists interested exposing the racial disparities in incarceration in their state. We have 52 graphs showing the incarceration rates for Latinos, Blacks and Whites, and 187 graphs showing racially disproportionate incarceration in all 50 states, D.C, Puerto Rico and the U.S. as a whole.

Nils Christie's new book: A Suitable Amount of Crime

May 14, 2004

Nils Christie is a world renowned criminologist whose previous work, Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style was one of the key inspirations for this site, has a new book: A Suitable Amount of Crime.

My copy arrived today and a review will be coming shortly. Barnes and Noble offers a synopsis: A Suitable Amount of Crime looks at the great variations between countries in what are considered "unwanted acts", how many are constructed as criminal and how many are punished. It explains the differences between eastern and western Europe, between the United States and the rest of the world. The author laments the size of prison populations in countries with large penal sectors, and asks whether the international community has a moral obligation to "shame" states that are punitive in the extreme.

The book is available for $32.95 from amazon and $22.95 from Barnes and Noble.

Nils Christie is also the author of Limits to Pain (1981) available on this site and Beyond Loneliness & Institutions: Communes for Extraordinary People (1989). He will be speaking at the CURE Convention in Washington D.C. on June 7.

Exporting prison torture

May 6, 2004

Abuse Common in U.S. Prisons, Activists Say

By Alan Elsner,Thu May 6, 2004

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Horrific abuses, some similar to those revealed in Iraq, 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.

"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 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.

The tape showed several inmates forced to strip and lie on the ground. A police dog attacked several prisoners; the tape clearly showed one being bitten on the leg. Guards prodded prisoners with stun guns and forced them to crawl along the ground. Then they dragged injured inmates face down back to their cells.

In a 1999 opinion, federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote of the situation in Texas state prisons: "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

Judy Greene of Justice Strategies, a New York City consultancy, said: "When I saw Bush's interview on Arab TV stations, I was thinking, had he ever stepped inside a Texas prison when he was governor?"

PRISON GUARDS INVOLVED

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.

Jenni Gainsborough of Penal Reform International said: "I don't think we routinely torture prisoners in the United States but abuse and humiliation regularly occur. They may have been trying to get information out of the Iraqis but some of those photographs look to me as if the U.S. personnel were enjoying inflicting the humiliation."

BRUTALITY DOCUMENTED

In Cook County Jail in Chicago, the elite Special Operations Response Team has been implicated in scores of incidents of racially motivated violence and brutality in recent years.

One of the most dramatic took place on Feb. 4, 1999, when SORT members accompanied by four guard dogs without muzzles ordered 400 prisoners to leave their cells in response to a gang-related stabbing three days earlier.

According to a 50-page report by the sheriff's Internal Affairs Division, the guards ransacked cells, then herded inmates into common areas where they were forced to strip and face the wall with hands behind their head. Anyone who looked away from the wall was struck with a wooden baton.

Some prisoners were forced to lie on the floor, where they were stomped and kicked. One inmate, who did not leave a cell fast enough said he was beaten with fists and batons until he urinated on himself and went into convulsions. At least 49 inmates told investigators they had been beaten. After the beatings, guards prevented inmates from receiving immediate medical care.

Corrections officer Roger Fairley testified in a deposition last year that guards were afraid to come forward to tell of what they had seen in case their colleagues took revenge.

"On many and many occasions I witnessed excessive force, abuse of power, intimidation," he said.