NYTimes.com Article: Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

[Guest guest]

The article below from NYTimes.com

has been sent to you by jprior@....

Who knows maybe they will get to the mental " hospitals " this time too. This guy

was trained in Utah. People from Utah have to be watched.

jprior@...

/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW

An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING

stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen - a

husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two

children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground

up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is

kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for

ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out.

Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/

Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

May 8, 2004

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has

been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons

with little public knowledge or concern, according to

corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are

routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being

moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In

Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in

Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form

of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new

inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in

theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they

were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to

crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses

have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal

consent decree during much of the time President Bush was

governor because of crowding and violence by guards against

inmates. Judge Wayne Justice of Federal District

Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were

allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates

as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the

reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and

trained the guards there resigned under pressure as

director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997

after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair

for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia,

was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive

of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under

investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to

Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges,

prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General

Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice

system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for

Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that

says it is the third-largest private prison company,

operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of

the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department

and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe

conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further

action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr.

McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq

last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to

open Abu Ghraib.

" I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's

operation after that time, " he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state

prison systems were under some form of court order, for

brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care,

said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing

Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that

calls for alternatives to incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in

Texas, " Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of

violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about

their own suffering from such abysmal conditions. "

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit

in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by

other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help,

and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave,

being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different

parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick , has

filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice

and the case is now before the United States Court of

Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara

Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison

Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is

representing Mr. .

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while

he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said

the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the

abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know

to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib

were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or

were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in

Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant

based near Seattle, said, " In some jurisdictions in the

United States there is a prison culture that tolerates

violence, and it's been there a long time. "

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the

number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the

last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he

said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire

large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained

guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr.

Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very

low. " Retention in these states is a big problem and so

unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or

captains in a few months, " he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq,

where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with

undertrained military police officers from Army reserve

units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to

restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including

Mr. McCotter, he said, " Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in

their native land, and we will help make that freedom

permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable

criminal justice system based on the rule of law and

standards of basic human rights. "

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Goodling, did not

return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had

chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the

Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice

Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been

a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a

colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the

Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the

corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before

taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill

inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a

prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation

and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing

prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com,

last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons

in Iraq, Abu Ghraib " is the only place we agreed as a team

was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell

housing and segregation. "

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so

Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls

and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis

who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid

for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he

carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that

the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly

reverted to their old ways, " shaking down families, shaking

down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of

prison. "

So the American team fired the guards and went with former

Iraqi military personnel. " They didn't have any bad habits

and did things exactly the way we trained them. "

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military

police officers at the prison, but he did not give any

names.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1085010432 & ei=1 & en=a1b\

ca0b8d9f84607

---------------------------------

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New York Times on the Web, please contact

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For general information about NYTimes.com, write to

help@....

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Guest guest]

The article below from NYTimes.com

has been sent to you by jprior@....

Who knows maybe they will get to the mental " hospitals " this time too. This guy

was trained in Utah. People from Utah have to be watched.

jprior@...

/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW

An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING

stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen - a

husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two

children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground

up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is

kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for

ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out.

Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/

Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

May 8, 2004

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has

been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons

with little public knowledge or concern, according to

corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are

routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being

moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In

Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in

Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form

of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new

inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in

theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they

were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to

crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses

have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal

consent decree during much of the time President Bush was

governor because of crowding and violence by guards against

inmates. Judge Wayne Justice of Federal District

Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were

allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates

as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the

reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and

trained the guards there resigned under pressure as

director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997

after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair

for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia,

was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive

of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under

investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to

Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges,

prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General

Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice

system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for

Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that

says it is the third-largest private prison company,

operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of

the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department

and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe

conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further

action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr.

McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq

last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to

open Abu Ghraib.

" I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's

operation after that time, " he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state

prison systems were under some form of court order, for

brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care,

said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing

Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that

calls for alternatives to incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in

Texas, " Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of

violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about

their own suffering from such abysmal conditions. "

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit

in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by

other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help,

and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave,

being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different

parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick , has

filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice

and the case is now before the United States Court of

Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara

Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison

Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is

representing Mr. .

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while

he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said

the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the

abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know

to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib

were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or

were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in

Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant

based near Seattle, said, " In some jurisdictions in the

United States there is a prison culture that tolerates

violence, and it's been there a long time. "

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the

number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the

last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he

said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire

large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained

guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr.

Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very

low. " Retention in these states is a big problem and so

unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or

captains in a few months, " he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq,

where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with

undertrained military police officers from Army reserve

units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to

restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including

Mr. McCotter, he said, " Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in

their native land, and we will help make that freedom

permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable

criminal justice system based on the rule of law and

standards of basic human rights. "

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Goodling, did not

return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had

chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the

Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice

Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been

a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a

colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the

Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the

corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before

taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill

inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a

prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation

and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing

prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com,

last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons

in Iraq, Abu Ghraib " is the only place we agreed as a team

was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell

housing and segregation. "

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so

Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls

and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis

who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid

for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he

carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that

the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly

reverted to their old ways, " shaking down families, shaking

down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of

prison. "

So the American team fired the guards and went with former

Iraqi military personnel. " They didn't have any bad habits

and did things exactly the way we trained them. "

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military

police officers at the prison, but he did not give any

names.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1085010432 & ei=1 & en=a1b\

ca0b8d9f84607

---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine

reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!

Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy

now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1 & Extern\

alMediaCode=W24AF

HOW TO ADVERTISE

---------------------------------

For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters

or other creative advertising opportunities with The

New York Times on the Web, please contact

onlinesales@... or visit our online media

kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to

help@....

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Guest guest]

The article below from NYTimes.com

has been sent to you by jprior@....

Who knows maybe they will get to the mental " hospitals " this time too. This guy

was trained in Utah. People from Utah have to be watched.

jprior@...

/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW

An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING

stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen - a

husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two

children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground

up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is

kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for

ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out.

Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/

Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

May 8, 2004

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has

been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons

with little public knowledge or concern, according to

corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are

routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being

moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In

Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in

Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form

of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new

inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in

theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they

were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to

crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses

have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal

consent decree during much of the time President Bush was

governor because of crowding and violence by guards against

inmates. Judge Wayne Justice of Federal District

Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were

allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates

as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the

reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and

trained the guards there resigned under pressure as

director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997

after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair

for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia,

was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive

of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under

investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to

Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges,

prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General

Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice

system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for

Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that

says it is the third-largest private prison company,

operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of

the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department

and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe

conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further

action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr.

McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq

last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to

open Abu Ghraib.

" I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's

operation after that time, " he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state

prison systems were under some form of court order, for

brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care,

said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing

Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that

calls for alternatives to incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in

Texas, " Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of

violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about

their own suffering from such abysmal conditions. "

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit

in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by

other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help,

and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave,

being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different

parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick , has

filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice

and the case is now before the United States Court of

Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara

Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison

Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is

representing Mr. .

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while

he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said

the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the

abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know

to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib

were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or

were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in

Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant

based near Seattle, said, " In some jurisdictions in the

United States there is a prison culture that tolerates

violence, and it's been there a long time. "

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the

number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the

last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he

said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire

large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained

guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr.

Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very

low. " Retention in these states is a big problem and so

unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or

captains in a few months, " he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq,

where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with

undertrained military police officers from Army reserve

units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to

restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including

Mr. McCotter, he said, " Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in

their native land, and we will help make that freedom

permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable

criminal justice system based on the rule of law and

standards of basic human rights. "

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Goodling, did not

return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had

chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the

Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice

Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been

a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a

colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the

Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the

corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before

taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill

inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a

prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation

and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing

prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com,

last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons

in Iraq, Abu Ghraib " is the only place we agreed as a team

was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell

housing and segregation. "

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so

Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls

and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis

who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid

for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he

carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that

the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly

reverted to their old ways, " shaking down families, shaking

down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of

prison. "

So the American team fired the guards and went with former

Iraqi military personnel. " They didn't have any bad habits

and did things exactly the way we trained them. "

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military

police officers at the prison, but he did not give any

names.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1085010432 & ei=1 & en=a1b\

ca0b8d9f84607

---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine

reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!

Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy

now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1 & Extern\

alMediaCode=W24AF

HOW TO ADVERTISE

---------------------------------

For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters

or other creative advertising opportunities with The

New York Times on the Web, please contact

onlinesales@... or visit our online media

kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to

help@....

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Guest guest]

The article below from NYTimes.com

has been sent to you by jprior@....

Who knows maybe they will get to the mental " hospitals " this time too. This guy

was trained in Utah. People from Utah have to be watched.

jprior@...

/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW

An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING

stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen - a

husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two

children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground

up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is

kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for

ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out.

Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/

Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

May 8, 2004

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has

been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons

with little public knowledge or concern, according to

corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are

routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being

moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In

Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in

Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form

of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new

inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in

theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they

were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to

crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses

have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal

consent decree during much of the time President Bush was

governor because of crowding and violence by guards against

inmates. Judge Wayne Justice of Federal District

Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were

allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates

as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the

reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and

trained the guards there resigned under pressure as

director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997

after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair

for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia,

was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive

of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under

investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to

Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges,

prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General

Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice

system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for

Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that

says it is the third-largest private prison company,

operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of

the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department

and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe

conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further

action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr.

McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq

last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to

open Abu Ghraib.

" I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's

operation after that time, " he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state

prison systems were under some form of court order, for

brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care,

said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing

Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that

calls for alternatives to incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in

Texas, " Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of

violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about

their own suffering from such abysmal conditions. "

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit

in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by

other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help,

and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave,

being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different

parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick , has

filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice

and the case is now before the United States Court of

Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara

Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison

Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is

representing Mr. .

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while

he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said

the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the

abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know

to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib

were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or

were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in

Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant

based near Seattle, said, " In some jurisdictions in the

United States there is a prison culture that tolerates

violence, and it's been there a long time. "

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the

number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the

last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he

said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire

large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained

guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr.

Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very

low. " Retention in these states is a big problem and so

unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or

captains in a few months, " he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq,

where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with

undertrained military police officers from Army reserve

units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to

restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including

Mr. McCotter, he said, " Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in

their native land, and we will help make that freedom

permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable

criminal justice system based on the rule of law and

standards of basic human rights. "

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Goodling, did not

return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had

chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the

Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice

Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been

a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a

colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the

Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the

corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before

taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill

inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a

prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation

and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing

prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com,

last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons

in Iraq, Abu Ghraib " is the only place we agreed as a team

was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell

housing and segregation. "

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so

Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls

and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis

who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid

for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he

carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that

the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly

reverted to their old ways, " shaking down families, shaking

down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of

prison. "

So the American team fired the guards and went with former

Iraqi military personnel. " They didn't have any bad habits

and did things exactly the way we trained them. "

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military

police officers at the prison, but he did not give any

names.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1085010432 & ei=1 & en=a1b\

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