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Torture in US Prisons - by Stephen Lendman
In March 2005, a UK Deborah Davis Channel 4 report titled, "Torture, Inc., America's Brutal Prisons" highlighted the horrors, including prisoners savaged by dogs, brutally shocked with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals, harmed by stun guns, beaten, stripped naked and abused in various other ways. Sound familiar? Welcome to mainland Guantanamo.
"It's terrible to watch some of the videos," witnessing torture, at times resulting in death. Routinely, guards yell at and abuse prisoners, "ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl." If they don't "drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stomps on his back." Another man screams when a dog bit his lower leg.
One other has a broken ankle, can't crawl fast enough so gets jabbed with a stun gun on his buttocks. Hours later his whole body still shakes. Men line up across the cellblock, guards standing over them shouting, prodding, kicking, and beating, their humiliation captured on video. The images are horrifyingly brutal, reminders of Guantanamo and Baghdad's Abu Ghraib. They're as commonplace in America, but unreported except by Channel 4 UK, calling it "wholesale torture taking place inside the US prison system," uncovered by a four-month investigation, not based on rumor or suspicion. Throughout America, videos and other solid evidence confirm it, what US major media reports won't reveal.
In most states, prison regulations mandate that guards videotape "use of force operations" like cell searches, in theory to show proper procedures were used. Most often, they reveal otherwise, clear evidence of inmate abuses - "a shocking insight into the reality of life inside" US prisons. Even the best of them are harsh, the worst hellish, Davis explaining that videos are "terrible" to watch, saying:
"you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one horrible scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair.' His hands and feet are shackled. There's a strap across his chest. His head rolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet."
He's being punished for having a pillowcase on his head in his cell and refusing to remove it. Why? He has a long history of schizophrenia, yet he's restrained for 16 hours. Two hours later, "he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment....We found 20 (other cases of) prisoners who've died in the past few years" after being brutally restrained, what American media won't report.
Two deaths were in Phoenix, AR county jail, run by "America's Toughest Sheriff," Joe Arpaio. "You don't want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe's jails." His toughness often ends tragically.
In one tape, nine deputies manhandle Charles Agster, a tiny man, a mentally disturbed drug user, arrested for disturbing the peace. Restrained in a chair, one deputy kneeled on his stomach, "pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists to the chair. Bending someone double for any length of time" can cause "positional asphyxia."
After 15 minutes, he's unconscious. He's already brain dead. Hospitalized, he expired three days later.
Another tape showed guards severely beating a man, Scott Norberg, including Tasering him 19 times and forcing him into a restraint chair. He suffocated.
Other inmates suffered similar abuse, including beatings causing broken bones, a broken neck, and internal injuries. One man died from septicaemia (blood poisoning) after a month in a coma.
In some tapes, sounds are as "unbearable" as images, a Florida prison one showing an inmate lying on a hospital examination table, guards ordering him to get into a wheelchair. "I can't, I can't," he shouts. "It hurts," after which he's Tasered on both hips, screams, but still can't get into the wheelchair.
Guards force him into it, bend his legs painfully, the man shrieking in agony. His lawyer said he's mentally impaired, has a back injury, can't walk, or bend his legs without intense pain. Yet guards try to make him stand and hold a walker. "He falls on the floor, crying in agony." He's Tasered again, lying there out of breath and energy, just moaning.
Other tapes show prisoners handcuffed, brutally beaten, kicked in the head, Tasered, while other guards "just stand around and watch." Photographs collected were also horrific, showing prisoners doused with pepper spray, "then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals." one image revealed a man with "a huge patch of raw skin over his hip." Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.
"Fire extinguisher" sized pepper spray canisters are used, at times inflicting second degree burns all over prisoners' bodies. For those targeted, "The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit," and shove cardboard in door cracks to make units air-tight.
