U.S. prison
construction booms,
abuse rampant
BY MICHAEL
ITALIE
A new report shows that prison
construction across the United States has undergone
an unprecedented boom in the last quarter-century,
as the federal and state governments have jailed
increasing numbers of people for longer and longer
periods.
The report, titled The New
Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison
Expansion, was released by the Urban Institute
in April. The study focused on the changes in the
last 25 years in the 10 states with the largest
prison increases—California, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New York,
Ohio, and Texas. Entire communities are now
dependent economically on the mushrooming prisons.
The construction boom is fueled by
the sharp and continuing rise in incarceration.
Between 1980 and 2002 the number of those held in
state or federal prisons increased from just over
half a million to 2,033,000. People behind bars, on
parole, or on probation more than tripled over the
same period to 6.7 million.
Recent reports by Reuters and other
media, based in part on facts provided by the
Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group
based in Washington, D.C., show that during this
time physical abuse and degradation of inmates by
prison guards has been widespread. In addition to
beatings, this has included routine stripping of
prisoners in front of other inmates before moving
them to another prison and forcing newly arrived
inmates to wear black hoods.
In the states with the largest
prison increases, the New Landscape of
Imprisonment study reveals that one-third of all
counties have at least one prison—an increase from
13 percent in 1979. Across the nation, the number of
state prisons alone grew from 592 in 1979 to 1,023
in the year 2000.
Florida tops the list with a state
or federal prison in more than three-quarters of all
counties. Next were California and New York, with 59
percent and 52 percent, respectively.
Texas led the way nationwide in
building new jails. In 2000 the state had 137
prisons, seven times the 1979 figure and 50 percent
more than Florida and California, the next highest.
While the majority of new prisons
built over the period studied were in metropolitan
areas, the four-fold increase in the prison
population as a whole has meant that in some rural
counties, prisoners now make up a significant
proportion of the overall population. Each of the 10
states has at least five counties where prisoners
make up 5 percent or more of the total residents. In
Concho County, Texas, prisoners make up 33 percent
of the population of 4,000. While 5 percent of the
population in the 10 states lives in rural areas, 23
percent of the prison population is locked up there.
The government includes the number
of prisoners in the census for determining the total
population of an area and its number of elected
representatives—even though prisoners are stripped
of their voting rights.
The report also notes that inmates
are more and more frequently forced to serve their
sentences far from their home counties. In Georgia,
Ohio, Texas, Florida, and California only four out
of a total of 626 counties had a high proportion of
prisoners from the local area.
Systematic abuse
According to the Sentencing Project, during the 25-year
prison boom 40 state prison systems were under some
form of court order for brutality, overcrowding,
poor food, or lack of medical care.
Methods of torture and human
degradations like those recently revealed in Iraq
have been rampant in U.S. jails, according to a May
8 report by Reuters and another one the same day in
the New York Times. Both cite corrections
officials, inmates, and human rights advocates as
their sources.
While the articles cite poor
training and difficulty hiring prison guards to keep
pace with the expanding prison population as reasons
for the brutal conditions, the sheer scope of the
evidence cited shows that abuse and degradation of
workers and farmers behind bars is an integral part
the capitalist "justice" system at home and abroad.
Some of the other examples cited in
the articles include:
Male inmates at the Maricopa
County Jail in Phoenix, Arizona, the Times
reports, "are forced to wear women’s pink
underwear as a form of humiliation."
Newly arriving inmates at
Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison
are forced to wear black hoods and are often
beaten and made to crawl on their knees to
humiliate them.
"Corrections experts," the
Times article says, "report some of the
worst abuses have occurred in Texas," whose
prisons were under a consent decree for much of
the 1990s because of violence by guards against
inmates and overcrowding. The decree was imposed
by a federal district judge after finding that
guards in Texas lockups were overseeing a sex
slave trade within the prisons.
Guards at Texas’s Brazoria
County jail, in September 1996, videotaped—for
"training purposes"—a mock drug raid that was
staged on inmates. Prisoners were forced to
strip and lie naked on the ground. Guards then
prodded the prisoners with stun guns and forced
them to crawl along the ground, before dragging
injured prisoners face down back to their cells.
The Special Operations Response
Team (SORT) at Chicago’s notorious Cook County
Jail has been implicated in scores of incidents
of racist terror against prisoners. On Feb. 4,
1999, SORT members with four unmuzzled police
dogs ordered 400 prisoners to leave their cells.
According to an Internal Affairs Division report
cited in a Reuters article, the guards forced
the prisoners to strip and herded them into a
common area where most were forced to face the
wall with their hands behind their heads. Other
prisoners were forced to lie on the floor where
they were stomped and kicked. Any prisoner
facing the wall who turned his head was struck
with a wooden baton, the report says.
