Torture behind bars: right here in the United States of America.
The Progressive › Vol. 58 Nbr. 7, July 1994
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Summary
Cover Story
Several case studies of police use of torture, from Chicago, California, Mississippi, and other jails, are provided. Statistics indicate that complaints of provocation and harsh discipline are rising nationwide.See the full content of this document
Extract
Torture behind bars: right here in the United States of America.
A thirteen-year-old boy is taken from outside his mother's home to a police interrogation room where he is subjected to electroshock and beaten until he confesses to a murder. Johannesburg, South Africa, 1976? No. Chicago, 1991. Guards enter a prisoner's concrete cell, shackle and gag him, and tell him he's going for a "bath." The prisoner is led to a tub of scalding water in the infirmary, in which he is placed naked, still restrained and gagged, and held down by several guards for thirty minutes. He suffers second- and third-degree burns over 30 per cent of his body. Chile, 1974? No. California, 1992.
The kind of torture most of us might imagine taking place only under ruthless dictatorships is astonishingly commonplace right here in the United States, in our prisons, jails, and police stations. In Chicago, internal city investigations have documented more than fifty incidents of torture committed by police officers. At the super-maximum-security Pelican Bay Prison in California, a class-action lawsuit charges that physical and psychological torture is part of the daily routine. And in Mississippi's jails, conditions "unfit for human habitation" and a record-high number of jailhouse deaths have prompted a US. Department of Justice civil-rights investigation. These cases--and many others--indicate that government employees working in jails and prisons have committed acts against their captive populations that fall under the United Nations' definition of torture. "Torture" is, according to the U.N.'s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, "the purposeful infliction of severe pain or suffering on a detainee by public officials or with the...See the full content of this document
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