Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Iraqi Prisoners Fairly Treated
Iraqi Prisoners Fairly Treated
by Aaron Kipnis, Ph.D.
American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners reveals more about the state of American domestic justice today than it does to chronicle casualties of our latest foreign war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently called the abuse at Abu Ghraib "fundamentally un-American." Secretary of State Colin Powell categorized the acts as "illegal against all standards,” while President Bush agreed that the abuse is "an affront to the most basic standards of morality and decency."
Prisoner abuse, however, is also rampant in American prisons. And its degree of severity readily matches that of prisoner treatment in Iraq. Thousands of American prison survivors know from experience that Iraqi prisoners were treated with chillingly similar standards of custodial care as those enacted against our own citizens.
American prisoners are commonly stripped nude and even subjected to body cavity searches in front of guards of the opposite sex. Thousands are housed in total sensory isolation for months, even years. During their incarceration many prisoners are subjected to injurious physical restraints, assaults with boots, batons, chemical and gas agents, electrical shock devices, rubber and real bullets. Violent deaths are often poorly investigated. It is well documented that thousands of low-level, predominately youthful offenders are raped in American prisons every month. Prison AIDS, TB and Hepatitis C infection rates are soaring.
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have repeatedly cited the US for its violations of human rights at home. “Homeland detainees” are disproportionately youth of color—many of whom are casualties of our domestic war on drugs. Increasing numbers of juveniles are being sent to adult prisons with harsher sentences by prosecutors granted broad new powers to unilaterally find them unfit for juvenile commitment. The result? We now have more youth in prison than any other nation on earth. Yet, our government remains unaccountable to its citizenry for what happens to them once they are incarcerated, away from public view.
Most homeland prisons are locked down tighter than those of our military in the field. Few are subject oversight by professionals who are independent of corrections officials and their powerful unions. Reporters are actually barred from many US prisons. Even so, over the last month alone in California, news reports surfaced of a recent video showing guards using an attack dog to assault a non-resisting juvenile and another video displaying already subdued youthful offenders being kicked, pepper sprayed and beaten senseless by their “counselors.” As in Iraq, hundreds of such pictures and videos documenting prisoner abuse also exist in our nation, but Congress is not looking at them.
Like other American leaders joining the chorus, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman, Senator John Warner rightly says the abuse in Iraq contradicts all our American values and that “Prompt and decisive action, will hopefully, convince the world that our free and open society does not condone and will not tolerate this depraved behavior.” Yet, systematic acts of torture and dehumanization are persistently committed against our own citizens—without censure.
President Bush says this behavior “does not reflect us.” Tragically, it does, and accurately. To regain the right to call ourselves global defenders of freedom and justice we must do much better at home as well. And we can. We know what to do.
Recent social, psychological, medical and forensic research clearly demonstrates that education, mental health treatment and economic opportunity work dramatically to reduce crime in otherwise at risk populations. We also confidently know that torture by any name never has and never will transform the hearts and minds of those who oppose or offend us. Only humane treatment and concerted efforts to rehabilitate offenders in our own nation, can assure a more caring, inclusive and less violent American culture in the future. The time is at hand for us to respond to the outrage abroad by also exposing and cleaning up our wide spread prison scandals at home. --Aaron Kipnis, Ph.D., author of Angry Young Men.
# 5/11/04; 2:24:18 PM
