Friday, April 5, 2019

FEDERAL REPORT: EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF VIOLENCE, SEXUAL ABUSE AND PRISONER DEATHS IN ALABAMA PRISONS

“An excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse, and prisoner deaths”

Federal report exposes horrific levels of abuse in Alabama prisons

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) released a 56-page report Wednesday systematically outlining the unchecked violence and sexual abuse which is the outcome of the degrading and subhuman conditions in the state of Alabama’s prison system. The report serves as a damning indictment of America’s entire criminal justice system, the largest in the world, which currently holding 2.3 million people in prisons and jails across the country in nearly identical conditions.
The report exposes appalling violations of constitutional protections for the approximately 25,000 men locked up in facilities operated by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), concluding that “an excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse, and prisoner deaths occur within Alabama’s prisons on a regular basis.”
[Credit: Amnesty International]
These conclusions were the outcome of a more than two-year federal investigation which was sparked by a class action lawsuit filed by the Equal Justice Initiative on behalf of men imprisoned in the St. Clair Correctional Facility, among the most notorious prisons in the state. The suit presented evidence of rampant abuse by Alabama prison officials.
Investigators were tasked with determining whether the ADOC was providing inmates with adequate protection from physical and sexual assault from fellow prisoners and from guards as well as guaranteeing safe and sanitary living conditions.
Beginning under the Obama administration and continuing through the Trump administration, including under the oversight of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former US Senator from Alabama, the investigation revealed conditions so horrifying that they could not simply be swept under the rug.
While the DoJ’s investigation only scratched the surface, the report notes that many assaults, rapes and deaths go unreported or are misclassified by prison officials, and serves as a confirmation that conditions in Alabama’s prison system, and the US as a whole, criminally and flagrantly exceed the Eighth amendment’s proscriptions on cruel and unusual punishment.
“The violations are severe, systemic,” the report’s authors note, “and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision; overcrowding; ineffective housing and classification protocols; inadequate incident reporting; inability to control the flow of contraband into and within the prisons, including illegal drugs and weapons; ineffective prison management and training; insufficient maintenance and cleaning of facilities; the use of segregation and solitary confinement to both punish and protect victims of violence and/or sexual abuse; and a high level of violence that is too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive.”
Investigators conducted interviews with more than 270 prisoners and reviewed hundreds of letters and emails from inmates and their family members to establish a picture of life in Alabama’s prisons.
Illustrating the brutal experience of inmates, the report outlines a dozen violent assaults and murders which occurred within one single week in September 2017. There were beatings, stabbings, drug overdoses and rapes recorded on every day of the week across the state’s penal system.
Three days before the arrival of DoJ investigators, a prisoner was stabbed to death by fellow inmates in the “Hot Bay” housing unit of Bibb Correctional Facility. Prisoners had to bang on the doors of the housing unit to get the attention of guards who rarely kept watch over the men held in the segregated unit. When guards finally arrived, the victim had dragged himself to the front doors, bleeding to death from a grievous chest wound.
The New York Times published an article prior to the report’s release noting that it had received from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) over 2,000 photos depicting abuse at St. Clair prison.
While the pictures constitute a powerful exposure of the nightmare confronting prisoners, the Times claimed most of them were too shocking or lacking proper context to publish. Only a handful have been posted, including one which shows a solitary confinement cell where a prisoner had cut himself with razor blades and scrawled in blood on the walls, “Im dprest [sic], Mental Health won’t help.” Another picture shows a prisoner on a medical table, his white shoes and white uniform stained with blood.
“I don’t think there is any dispute that the conditions in Alabama prisons are desperate. They are the worst I’ve seen in 35 years. There is an immediate need for reform,” Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “People are being murdered on a regular basis.”
Despite the shocking nature of the revelations and the urgent need of prisoners for protection, there is little to indicate that anything will change for the better in Alabama’s prisons. The Trump administration will leave the decision on what, if any, reforms to implement up to Republican Governor Kay Ivey and the Republican-controlled state legislature without even the fig leaf of federal oversight. Ivey is proposing to spend more than $1 billion to build three new prisons for men, while Republican legislators are considering a proposal by the ADOC to hire 500 additional prison guards.
US District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in 2017 in a lawsuit brought against the ADOC by the SPLC that Alabama prisons provided “horrendously inadequate” mental health care to inmates and required changes to remedy the situation. However, after the prison system recorded 15 suicides over the last 15 months, Thompson is once again hearing testimony on how to implement preventive measures and put a stop to what prisoners’ attorneys have described as an “ultra-emergency.”
Inmates should not expect any relief from the Supreme Court, which ruled Monday in Bucklew v. Precythe, by a 5-4 vote, that the execution by lethal injection of a prisoner with a rare form of cancer, which would result in him suffering severe pain, did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, author of the opinion, engaged in an extensive discussion of the forms of execution which would have been considered cruel and unusual at the time the Eighth amendment was adopted in 1791, ruling out only hanging, drawing and quartering, dragging through the streets, and being burned at the stake. Applying this same logic, the conditions confronted by prisoners across the United States could only be considered cruel and unusual if officials decided to bring back mutilation, branding, the stocks, or penal transportation, as forms of punishment.

America the Barbaric


Rapes, murders, beatings, stabbings, mutilations and arson are rampant. Pleas for help, scrawled in blood, stain the walls from prisoners held in solitary confinement. Fifteen suicides have been recorded in the last 15 months.
This is not the description of a torture chamber in el-Sisi’s Egypt or Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. Nor is it about the abuse of detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or a CIA black site.
These are the nightmare conditions in the Alabama state-run prison system, described in a Justice Department report released this week. They constitute a gross violation of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
More than 2,000 photos of abuse in one Alabama prison given to the media by the Southern Poverty Law Center in advance of the report’s release depict the gruesome reality of the conditions detailed in hundreds of interviews with prisoners and their families conducted by federal investigators over more than two years.
While particularly horrific, such conditions are by no means unique. They are repeated in different forms in the prisons of every state, county and city across the United States. More than 2.3 million people are packed like cattle into America’s overflowing system of state and federal prisons, local jails and immigration detention camps. Including those on probation or parole, nearly seven million Americans are caught up in what is absurdly called the “criminal justice system.”
The US accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s incarcerated population. For every 100,000 residents, there are 698 people in detention. More than 540,000 of those held in jail on any given day have not been convicted of any crime. Many are kept in detention simply because they are too poor pay to pay the median bail of $10,000. Another half a million, one in five inmates, are serving long prison sentences for nonviolent drug convictions.
Researchers estimate that 61,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement on any given day, a form of incarceration that the UN has declared to be tantamount to torture. At least 4,000 of those held in complete isolation from the outside world suffer from severe mental illness. Confinement to these living coffins is known to drive prisoners to suicide.
While debtors’ prisons are officially outlawed, poor workers are routinely held for their debts. A mother in Indiana was detained for three days in February in a squalid jail alongside convicts because of an unpaid ambulance bill, which she had never received in the mail. Such stories are common.
Under the Trump administration, extending the policies developed by Obama, the federal government is waging a war on immigrants, holding thousands of men, women and children in degrading conditions. Some 77,000 people were detained in February for seeking to cross the southern border. Immigrant workers are being hunted down and arrested in their homes and at their work places.
The cruelty of the American government was on full display this week when 280 undocumented workers were detained by federal agents in Allen, Texas. It was the largest such raid in more than a decade.
Then there is the unending wave of police killings, with more than 1,000 people shot, tased or beaten to death every year on the streets of American cities. Criminal charges for police killings are rare and convictions almost unheard of. Cops are given a green light to kill, maim and brutalize with impunity.
With boundless hypocrisy, Democrats and Republicans proclaim their outrage over alleged human rights violations in whatever country the American ruling class is targeting for regime change or invasion. They proclaim one of the most cruel and unequal societies in the world, where the three richest Americans control more wealth than the bottom half of the population, to be a beacon of democracy to the world.
If the conditions that exist in US prisons were exposed in Russia or China, there would be a hue and cry in the press and the halls of Congress for economic sanctions and “humanitarian” military intervention that would resound in the media.
Fifty years ago, a report such as that exposing the conditions in Alabama prisons would have been met, even within sections of the political and media establishment, with shock and demands for action, but today it passes with barely a murmur.
The Democratic Party is silent because it is complicit in the vast retrogression in conditions in US prisons. President Bill Clinton signed the legislation that paved the way for a historic increase in the prison population. The Democrats oversee a prison system in California that was found by the Supreme Court in 2011 to be “cruel and unusual” and in violation of the Constitution.
The upper-middle class, self-obsessed layers in and around the Democratic Party are disinterested. The promoters of the #MeToo campaign in the media and academia have nothing to say about sexual violence in American prisons, nor about the violence inflicted on immigrants fleeing to the United States.
The media has made as little as possible of the report, with no coverage on the major nightly news programs. As with the photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib and the Senate report on CIA torture, there has been an effort to suppress information of what is happening in Alabama. The New York Times and other media outlets have chosen not to publish most of the photos documenting abuse and death.
In the end, this is their state. The conditions of American prisons, and the overall apparatus of violence, is a noxious expression of the reality of American “democracy.” The state apparatus will be utilized in the suppression of social and political opposition to the demands of finance capital. It is the real face of American capitalism.

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