As courts-martial get under way in Baghdad for the prison-abuse
scandal, critics are urging Americans to look inside their own
criminal justice system for the root of the problems in Iraq.
On the surface, there are appear to be several parallels. One of
the Abu Ghraib defendants, Spc. Charles Graner, is a former guard at
a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania that has a history of
prisoner abuse. Although accused, he was never found guilty. And
Lane McCotter, a senior contractor brought in to reopen Abu Ghraib
and train guards, was forced to resign as the head of corrections in
Utah: A mentally ill inmate died there after being strapped naked to
a restraining chair for more than 16 hours.
Indeed, inmates, human rights activists, and even some
corrections officials contend that abuse, humiliation, and gang rape
are common in some US prisons.
But after a generation of litigation and concerted efforts to
increase the professionalism in the corrections establishment,
American prisons have, in general, become far more humane. Few
believe that the kind of extreme sexual humiliation that occurred in
Abu Ghraib would be tolerated in most US prisons - at least not for
long.
"I don't think abuse is common in American prisons, but there are
some abuses in all American prisons," says Robert Johnson, a
professor at American University in the department of Justice Law
and Society. "And in some cases, the abuses can be widespread."
The renegades
It is in the so-called renegade prisons, and whole renegade
jurisdictions, where some abuses may be even worse than those in
Iraq. And there, experts say, the same factors will be at play that
led to the Abu Ghraib scandal.
"If you find one of those renegade prisons, you'll find there's a
problem with leadership, that there are either abused or flawed
policies or procedures, little or no training, and poor
supervision," says Chase Riveland, a former corrections commissioner
in Colorado and Washington State. "And when you combine that with a
deviant culture, then you have problems like we saw in Iraq."
Prisons by nature are volatile, difficult places no matter where
they are. People are held in cells, essentially cages, against their
will by others who are charged with trying to keep them in line.
Overcrowding, a problem that has escalated in American prisons
over the past 25 years as the prison population has quadrupled to
more than 2.1 million, has intensified that tension between guards
and inmates. It's also created fiscal pressures, leaving less
experienced guards dealing with larger populations and fewer
resources for education, rehabilitation, and recreation. And then
there are cultural and racial gaps: Most US inmates are people of
color from urban areas, while most prisons are in predominantly
white rural areas.
Many of these same dynamics were at work in Abu Ghraib, where
inexperienced American reservists were charged with guarding large
numbers of Iraqi detainees. "In Iraq, on top of those huge gaps in
race and culture increasing tensions, you get language barriers that
for the most part are insurmountable," says Marc Mauer, assistant
director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice reform think
tank in Washington. "In the day-to-day interactions, the prisoners
become dehumanized because there's no communication, and much less
sympathy or compassion for anyone's plight."
Such dehumanization is usually a key ingredient when abuse
occurs, say experts. In California, where allegations of widespread
abuse throughout the system have prompted a state Senate
investigation, experts blame overcrowding, a gang culture, and a
poorly educated workforce for creating a culture of dehumanization.
That has been exacerbated by guards protecting one another.
"There is a code of silence in California prisons that turns good
officers to bad," says Richard Steffen, staff director for the
Senate Government Oversight Committee looking into the abuse. "They
are forced not to report wrongdoing because if they do, they could
be ostracized."
Prison accreditation
California is one of a handful of states where no prisons are
accredited by the American Correctional Association (ACA), the
national organization of professional correctional officials. Out of
the nation's almost 1,600 prisons, about half are fully ACA
accredited. To win that designation, correctional officers have to
be fully trained, and the facilities must be fully transparent -
which means community members have access so that if there are
abuses, they can be addressed.
"I believe that when abuses are brought to the attention of
directors of corrections, wardens, and jail managers, they're fully
investigated, and appropriate sanctions are taken, including
dismissal from position and prosecution, when appropriate," says
James Gondles, executive director of the ACA.
But plenty of inmates in places like Texas, which since the 1999
court ruling has been working to reform its prisons, still find too
many correctional officials uninterested in abuse allegations. While
Roderick "Keith" Johnson was serving time for passing a bad check in
the Allred prison in Wichita Falls, Texas, he claims he was made a
sex slave by rival gangs of inmates. He pleaded for help from all
levels of the prison system, right up to the commissioner, but
claims he was ignored.
He's now suing, and his case will be heard in July. "Seeing those
pictures of those people in Iraq and the way they were abused, I saw
a lot of similarities with what goes on here," says Mr. Johnson,
who's out of prison and helping other ex-offenders reenter local
communities. "At least there you've got pictures to show what was
happening, but here we don't, so it harder to prove."
Even Mr. Gondles admits that abuses do occur in US prisons. "But
I don't believe that it's endemic in American jails and prisons," he
says. "And what happened in one institution in Iraq is not
representative of what goes on in America."
