Prison Torture Begins at Home

Abuse of prisoners isn't as "un-American" as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims. One need only look at everyday occurrences in American prisons, writes a former inmate.

"Un-American" -- that's what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is calling the abuse of prisoners in a U.S. military prison in Iraq.

But it seems to me that brutal, sadistic acts against prisoners are not a new national topic of conversation.

At least once a year the country is privy to footage of prison guards beating inmates, or police officers bludgeoning handcuffed civilians at traffic stops.

Just two months ago we saw minute-long videotape footage of several guards viciously beating two young men in California Youth Authority custody. This followed revelations four years ago that some wards had been handcuffed and slammed into walls, shot at close range by CYA staff with potentially lethal riot guns and forcibly injected with anti-psychotic drugs.

Remember the disturbing 1996 videotape of naked prisoners crawling on their bellies in a Texas jail as they were hit with batons, kicked and in some cases bitten by German-shepherds?

Do you recall Corcoran State Prison, where eight guards were accused in 1997 of staging gladiator-like fights between inmates, then shooting and killing some of them in the name of prison security?

And who can forget Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, raped with a stick in the custody of New York City's finest that same year?

There were whispered reports last year, some originating from the Red Cross, about abuses against detainees in U.S. military custody in Iraq. I read them. Perhaps you did, too. There are always allegations made, and reports released, that tell of widespread human rights abuses in American prisons and jails. But nobody cares to believe the truth until one or two photos or videotapes emerge.

I spent seven years in prison for bank robbery. I did my time in six different prisons. I personally witnessed myriad abuses by guards at every single prison. Prisons are full of blatantly sadistic men. I was one of them. But some of the cruel and inhumane men behind prison gates were sadists posing as guards.

While Donald Rumsfeld calls the abusive treatment of prisoners "un-American," others might look at that other long American experiment with humiliation and confinement -- slavery -- and call those Iraq photos an echo of our country's past. (Those pointy hoods on the inmates are haunting reminders of ol' Dixie, aren't they?)

Even the dissemination of the torture photos on CD is a modern twist on a deep American tradition. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Americans used to mail postcards of lynchings to family and friends, with remarks scribbled on the back like, "Look what we did last Sunday afternoon. We got things under control down here." In the picture you'd see a mob surrounding the body of a beaten black man hanging from a tree, his pants pulled down to his ankles as a final indignity.

You might wonder, who were those people? I submit they were everyday Americans.

The other day I waited with my banker while a machine took a long time to spit out a new ATM PIN number. We started talking. After a few minutes he mentioned that his son-in-law, who works at a prison, told him, "Thank god for steel toe boots, because they really make the prisoners jump." My banker morbidly chuckled. He didn't know that I have been kicked by guards with their steel toe boots, and that I didn't jump so much as wince and curl up into a ball on the floor.

In fact, there's no better place to get jiggy with one's vigilante fantasies than in prison. It's easy to get away with committing crimes against prisoners in the name of "security." Rarely are there cameras around to catch the brutality.

A malicious guard can place you in handcuffs, then sweep your feet out from underneath you so that you hit your head hard on the ground. On the incident report he'll write that you tried to attack him. Or he can place handcuffs so hard on your wrists that they'll bleed, all in the name of security. This is Corrections 101. The simplest ways that your body can be abused, all day long, without recourse. And I haven't begun to talk about the specials ways that a cruel guard can mess with your food, or the subtle ways that he or she can disrupt your sleep, night after night, if desired.

I'm not calling our prisons gulags. I'm saying that abuse of prisoners occurs more frequently in American prisons, in more ways, than the citizenry cares to know. I was not shocked by the photos of prisoners being tortured by young Americans in Abu Ghraib. I am, however, still surprised that you are.

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