HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES SHAME OUR COUNTRY

When it comes to human rights abuses, Brenda Smith can tell you some awful
stories.

She can knot your throat with tales of male guards who sexually abused
female inmates. Tales of women prisoners, some impregnated by guards,
forced to give birth with shackles on their legs.

The most disturbing thing you'll hear from Smith, a Washinton attorney, is
that these brutalities happened not in some banana republic but right here
in the United States.

Four years ago, Smith convinced a federal judge in the District of Columbia
that such practices constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately,
the judge's ruling against the shackling of pregnant inmates and the
supervision of female prisoners by men applies only in the nation's capital,
the judicial district in which it was rendered. In the rest of this
country, they are still legal.

It's this cruel reality -- and a long list of other offenses -- that has
caused Amnesty International to declare that "There is a persistent and
widespread pattern of human rights violations in the U.S.A."

In a 151-page report issued Tuesday, the watchdog organization says police
officers, prison guards and immigration officials in this country regularly
subject people -- most of them minorities -- to inhuman and degrading
treatment.

Amnesty International also condemns the United States for indefinitely
jailing most people who seek asylum here, for its use of the death penalty
and for exporting arms and security equipment to governments with a history
of human rights abuse.

The list of offenses doesn't rise to the level of Serbia's ethnic cleansing,
the horrific tribal massacres in Rwanda, or Myanmar's brutal suppression of
its democracy movement. But it still paints a disturbing picture of human
rights abuses in this country -- one that far too many Americans fail to
recognize.

"We are so accustomed to viewing ourselves as above this kind of behavior
that we are reluctant to look at things that happen here at home and think
of them as human rights abuses," Smith says. In other words, we're in
denial.

We know what a human rights abuse is when we see it in China, El Salvador or
Iraq, but we can't fathom its existence in this country.

It's inhumane to hogtie prisoners or strap a 50,000-volt stun-belt to their
bodies. It's unwise to give male guards unrestricted supervision of female
prisoners and unconscionable to aid the security forces of foreign
governments with monstous human rights records.

Even before Amnesty International focused its attention, a lot of us knew we
had a problem. What distinguishes us from many of other targets of Amnesty
International's human rights reports is our ability to make things better.

DeWayne Wickham is a columnist for Gannett News Services.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst