America's Rape Rooms by Max Blumenthal

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/05/con04209.html

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I.

In December 2003, a guard at a notoriously brutal prison used a German shepherd to attack a 20-year-old prisoner lying on the ground and not resisting. The attack, reported on May 9th by the Los Angeles Times, was not carried out at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where Americans were photographed torturing Iraqi prisoners; it occurred in Stockton, California at a juvenile correctional facility. Such abuse runs rampant throughout America's prison system, where prisoners are routinely raped, tortured, beaten and humiliated by guards employing brutality to enforce order.

Thus it is not surprising that two of the alleged ringleaders in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are both former civilian prison guards. Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick was a guard at Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia, part of a state prison system where violent abuse of inmates by prison guards is common. Specialist Charles Graner was a guard at Pennsylvania's Greene State Correctional Institute, a notorious death row facility described by an attorney who visited it as "a concentration camp."

Frederick and Graner's experience in the US prison system made them prime candidates for posts at Abu Ghraib. As Sgt. Frederick wrote in a letter to his family in 2003, "I was placed in because of my civilian background working as a correctional officer.... The wanted it run like a prison in the US." Because Abu Ghraib was indeed run like a US prison, the torture that occured there can not be viewed as an aberration. Abu Ghraib symbolizes the exportation of the prison system spawned by President George Bush Sr.'s War on Drugs to the battlefields of his son's War on Terror. Thus, for any attempt by America to repair the damage inflicted by prisoner abuse abroad to succeed, it must be accompanied by a thorough examination and reform of its prison system at home.

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To take his war to the streets, Bush tapped Los Angeles' police chief Darryl Gates, a longtime Republican activist with his eye on the California governorship. Gates devised a military-style anti-gang program called "Operation Hammer" to impose de facto martial law on LA's ghettoes and round up gang members with a set of tactics reminiscent of Vietnam. As Hammer began in April 1988, Gates declared, "This is war... We want to get the message out to the cowards out there, and that's what they are, rotten little cowards -- we want the message to go out that we're going to come and get them." In the operation's first phase, Gates created a "narcotic enforcement zone" in the heavily Latino Pico-Union neighborhood, fencing off a 27 block area with barricades and checkpoints and arresting thousands.
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and then didn't Gates go to Philly and train their cops and then didn't he go to Miami where we all saw his wonderfullness during the protests. (or was that some other cop?)

private owned prisons are a business scam of the bushgang.

they need to be invaded and liberated. They have some pigfuckers in charge there that make the boys from Deliverance look like Mother Theresa.

Virginia has a fine Democratic governor with approval ratings in the 60s, who has just won a major battle with the Republican General Assembly. In terms of standards of living, education, especially crime, Virginia is infinitely better than your state, home of the last lynching in America. Virginia is home of the only elected African American governor in the 20th century.

I was being sarcastic and hotheaded, especially since there are several states worthy of "liberation" from the luddites. I know there are good guys everywhere trying their best to make things better, but usually it's only bad news that makes the news.

are totally nonchalant about what is happening right under their noses, in our own country. I would venture a guess that what goes on in our prison system here in America is worse than anything that has happened in Iraq?

Want proof?

www.spr.org

Of course they best way not to suffer those inhumanities is to stay out of prison. But I guess that goes without saying...

nt

You could be thrown in with rapists and murderers for a minimum of 10 years in certain states. Is that justice?

Justify any type of abuse by saying, "don't do the crime"....I hope that attitude dies from the face of the earth.

I'd expect nothing less.

:toast: