Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

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Sun, 3 Apr 2005 19:44:41 -0400

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

 

 

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons: Video and text. Warning: you

will witness young men dying

 

 

 

http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/1174935.htm

 

 

 

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons: Video and text. Warning: you

will witness young men dying

 

 

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

 

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic

Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the

horrors that were committed in Iraq?

 

By Deborah Davies

 

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place

inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month

investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to watch some of the

videos and realise that you're not only seeing torture in action but,

in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

 

Click here to view

 

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

 

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic

Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the

horrors that were committed in Iraq?

 

By Deborah Davies

 

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place

inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month

investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to watch some of the

videos and realise that you're not only seeing torture in action but,

in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

 

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle

prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to

strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to

lie on the ground and crawl. `Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.'

 

If a prisoner doesn't drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks

him or stamps on his back. There's a high-pitched scream from one man

as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

 

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can't crawl fast enough so a

guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps

through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole

body shakes.

 

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock

while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

 

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by

one of the guards.

 

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly

familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu

Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

 

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi

prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

 

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war

zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in

Texas

 

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place

inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month

investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

 

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on

solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the

U.S.

 

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any `use of

force operation', such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by

a guard.

 

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed

and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the

exact opposite.

 

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside

the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with

President Bush's commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy

against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

 

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush

was state Governor.

 

Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation battle

on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his reaction when the Abu

Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S. politicians rushed to express

their astonishment and disgust that such abuses could happen at the

hands of American guards.

 

`I thought: " What hypocrisy, " Carlson told me. `Because they know we

do it here every day.'

 

All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared Carlson's

belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of a few rogue

individuals, was simply the export of the worst practices that take

place in the domestic prison system all the time. They pointed to the

mountain of files stacked on their desks, on the floor, in their

office corridors – endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment

inside America's own prisons.

 

Many of the tapes we've collected are several years old. That's

because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of

reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

 

But for every `historical' tape we collected, we also found a more

recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

 

It's terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you're not

only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are

witnessing young men dying.

 

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being

led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a

medieval-looking device called a `restraint chair'. His hands and feet

are shackled, there's a strap across his chest, his head lolls

forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet.

 

The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a

pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a

long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they

release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a

blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

 

The tape comes from Utah – but there are others from Connecticut,

Florida, Texas, Arizona and probably many more. We found more than 20

cases of prisoners who've died in the past few years after being held

in a restraint chair.

 

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in

Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of

`America's Toughest Sheriff.'

 

His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and we were

promised `unfettered access.' It was a reassuring turn of phrase – you

don't want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe's jails.

 

We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his

tough stance can end in tragedy.

 

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in

by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally

disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance

in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the

Sheriff's deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more

than nine stone, but he's struggling.

 

The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair.

One of them kneels on Agster's stomach, pushing his head forward on to

his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair.

 

Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the

manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair' warn of the dangers of

`positional asphyxia.'

 

Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The

cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he's already

brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. Agster's family is

currently suing Arizona County.

 

His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: `If that's not torture, I

don't know what is.' Charles's father, Chuck, listened in silence as

we filmed the interview, but every so often he padded out of the room

to cry quietly in the kitchen.

 

The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a

similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for

causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned

up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like

Charles Agster – he suffocated.

 

The county's insurers paid Norberg's family more than £4 millions in

an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was furious with the deal.

`My officers were clear,' he said. `The insurance firm was afraid to

go before a jury.'

 

Now he's determined to fight the Agster case all the way through the

courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe's jail, there'll probably be

someone else strapped into the chair.

 

Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves.

Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son,

Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you

can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator.

 

He was another of Sheriff Joe's inmates. After an argument with

guards, he told a prison doctor they'd beaten him up. Six days later,

he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck,

broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died

from septicaemia.

 

`Mr Arpaio is responsible.' Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak

through her tears. `He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this

mentality that these men are nothing.'

 

In some of the tapes it's not just the images, it's also the sounds

that are so unbearable. There's one tape from Florida which I've seen

dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.

 

It's an authorised `use of force operation' – so a guard is videoing

what happens. They're going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders.

 

The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison

hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a

wheelchair. `I can't, I can't!' he shouts with increasing desperation.

`It hurts!'

 

One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as

the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won't get into the

wheelchair.

 

The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend

his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man's lawyer

told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back

injury and can't walk or bend his legs without intense pain.

 

The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the

prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor,

crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and

breath to cry and just lies there moaning.

 

One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A

surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an

argument between staff members and two `wards' – they're not called

prisoners.

 

One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward

to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in

the head.

 

Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is

also punched and kicked in the head – even after he's been handcuffed.

Other staff just stand around and watch.

 

We also collected some truly horrific photographs.

 

A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high security state

prison ordered an end to the videoing of `use of force operations.' So

we have no tapes to show how prison guards use pepper spray to punish

prisoners.

 

But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in pepper

spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals.

Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has a huge patch of

raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in an angry rash across his

neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

 

`They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper spray,'

lawyer Christopher Jones explained. `We have had prisoners who have

had second degree burns all over their bodies.

 

`The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit.

Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in the crack of the door to

make sure it's really air-tight.'

 

And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison reports,

their infringements included banging on the cell door and refusing

medication. From the same Florida prison we also have photographs of

Frank Valdes – autopsy pictures. Realistically, he had little chance

of ever getting out of prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a

prison officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric Chair

– he didn't expect to be beaten to death.

 

Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose the

corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of guards

stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of

his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die.

 

Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the trial

was held in their own small hometown where almost everyone works for,

or has connection with, the five prisons which ring the town. The

foreman of the jury was former prison officer. The guards were all

acquitted.

 

Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the time of

the killing – the same man who changed the policy on videoing – has

been promoted. He's now the man in charge of all the Florida prisons.

 

How could anyone excuse – still less condone – such behaviour? The few

prison guards who would talk to us have a siege mentality. They see

themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so

they back each other up, no matter what.

 

I asked one serving officer what happened if colleagues beat up an

inmate. `We cover up. Because we're the good guys.'

 

No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison officers are

decent individuals doing their best in difficult circumstances. But

when horrific abuse by the few goes unreported and uninvestigated, it

solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many.

 

At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in modern-day

America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost.

The focus is entirely on punishment – even loss of liberty is not seen

as punishment enough. Being on the restraint devices and the chemical

sprays.

 

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I've stayed in

contact with various prisoners' rights groups and the families of many

of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh

horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in

Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

 

Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video material

from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being stripped, beaten and

pepper sprayed. One of those affected is Omar Deghayes, one of the

seven British residents still being held there.

 

His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye. American

military investigators have reviewed the tapes and apparently found

`no evidence of systematic abuse.'

 

But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey across

the U.S. told me: `We've become immune to the abuse. The brutality has

become customary.'

 

So far, the U.S. government is refusing to release these Guantanamo

tapes. If they are ever made public – or leaked – I suspect the images

will be very familiar.

 

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards

may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much is it is

taking place in America's own backyard.

 

Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her

investigation, Torture: America's Brutal Prisons, was shown on

Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.