ABUSE ALSO IN US PRISONS, EXPERTS SAY

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been
uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public
knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and
human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped
in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new
unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa
County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a
form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have
reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from
spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by
guards and made to crawl on their knees, also a form of
humiliation.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have
occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree
during much of the time President Bush was governor because of
crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne
Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding
that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other
inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there
resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of
Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a
restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from
schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive for
Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is
the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons.

One of the company's jails was under investigation by the Justice
Department when Mr. McCotter was sent to Iraq as part of a team of
prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by
Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal
justice system.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison
systems were under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding,
poor food or lack of medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director
of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington
that calls for alternatives to incarceration.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in Washington
State and Colorado and now a prison consultant based near Seattle,
said, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison
culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time."