AN UGLY PRISON RECORD

Given the Way It Treats Its Own Inmates, America Shouldn't Be Shocked
at the Abuse of Iraqis

For a nation founded on slavery and genocide, Americans retain an
astonishingly enduring faith in their continuing righteousness. They
are sounding this note again as the prison torture scandal continues
in Iraq.

In a column in the New York Times last week, Middle East analyst
Thomas Friedman warned that the revelations created the "danger of
losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in
the world."

Does he not read the world's newspapers? Uncle Sam as moral
authority?

Other U.S. pundits similarly harrumphed about America's endangered
integrity and leadership. President George W. Bush himself said the
prison mistreatments were not the American way.

But they were, and they are.

Friedman's column was headlined, "Restoring our honour," but the abuse
of prisoners surprises nobody who reads newspapers or scans the
Internet. Americans have been mistreating and torturing their fellow
Americans in their own lock-ups for decades. What honour is there to
restore?

In "liberal" California, horror stories have appeared for years from
hellholes such as Pelican Bay prison, where they house "the worst of
the worst" -- and also inflict the worst brutalities. A prisoner
dumped in scalding water so his skin peeled off like old varnish;
prisoners left naked outside in rainy and bitter weather for days;
multiple beatings and rapes; several unexplained deaths.

In Corcoran prison, California, guards held their own Roman gladiator
games with prisoners pitted against each other in fights to the near
death. A disliked and defenceless prisoner was placed in the same cell
as the biggest and baddest sex criminal -- known as the Booty Bandit
- -- to be duly raped to the amusement of the prisoner's supposed guardians.

Pelican Bay is such a fearful place, with prisoners kept under
perpetual scrutiny while unable to see any other human being, a
psychiatrist told a court that many were going insane.

A federal judge finally ordered reforms, as did another over Corcoran,
but there is little evidence that either have become proper places
even to house the worst.

Similar reports surface across America. Texas is especially
bad.

Significantly, private, for-profit prisons have some of the worst
records.

They often have such poor medical facilities that prisoners die from
curable conditions, as Harper's magazine revealed in an exhaustive
inquiry last year.

California holds more prisoners than Britain, France, Germany, and
Canada combined, yet jails are still grossly overcrowded. Conditions
in many southern U.S. prisons resemble some of the worst of the
developing world, with prisoners sleeping on filthy floors overrun by
rats.

In 1999, it was reported that 13 women at California's state-run
Chowchilla female detention centre had died the previous year from
negligent, or non-existent, medical care. Amnesty International
reported in 1999 that male guards in several U.S. states routinely
raped female prisoners.

In a book published in 2001, Going Up The River, former Wall Street
Journal reporter Joseph Hallinan told of visiting a prison in Alabama
where chained inmates still broke boulders with sledgehammers.

The sheriff of Phoenix, Ariz. was re-elected by loyal voters after
bringing in female convict chain gangs. All this has been going on
since Saddam Hussein was a young man.

It has worsened in recent years, despite a massive prison-building
program that now incarcerates 2 million, the world's largest prison
population.

Yet Americans have mostly ignored the disgrace of their penal
system.

They became so fearful of crime, they lost consideration for the lives
of criminals. Any idea of rehabilitation has been abandoned. Even when
scandals over mistreatment do emerge, many say the inmates deserve
it.

This does not excuse commentators such as Friedman, or the shocked,
shocked, demeanour of U.S. news anchors and commentators.

Yet the details from Iraq itself support the view that prisoner abuse
in Iraq was inevitable.

At Abu Ghraib prison, the alleged main perpetrator is staff sergeant
Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 37, the senior of six non-officers charged with
cruelty and other mistreatment. He is a part-time military policeman
called up last year for service in Baghdad -- and was a prison guard
for six years in Virginia.

Another reflection on the role of private enterprise in U.S.
incarceration is the background of Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski,
also a military police reservist in Iraq.

When she was put in command of Abu Ghraib and its thousands of Iraqi
inmates last year, she had never done penal work before. In the army
she was an intelligence officer and in private life, a business consultant.

Shortly before her suspension from duty she told a Florida newspaper
that her prisoners were living so well, she was worried they wouldn't
want to return home.

Another American living in dreamland.