The controversy has obscured questions about where and how such
tactics ever developed. US corrections experts and former inmates
agree that the Iraqi detainees experienced the standard fare of US
prisons, where authorities largely ignore abuse by guards, squalid
conditions and danger from other inmates.
"In the United States there is an implicit mandate that our
prisons really need to punish," said James Alan Fox, a professor of
criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. "As far as
many politicians are concerned rehabilitation and treatment are no
longer a great concern."
"Just like in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, nakedness is often used
in American prisons to humiliate and to punish," agrees Alan Elsner,
author of Gates of Injustice, a study of corruption and
brutality in US prisons.
"Dogs are often used to intimidate and bite. Sexual intimidation
and abuse occurs not only between inmates but also between staff and
inmates - it happens frequently," says Mr Elsner, a Reuters
journalist. The "brutality of prison life" and widespread human
rights violations pervade the US prison system, he says.
Specialist Charles Graner and Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, two
Abu Ghraib guards now facing courts martial for alleged involvement
in prisoner abuse, worked as former correctional officers in US
prisons. The New York Times reported this month that Spc Graner once
worked in a Pennsylvania prison where guards routinely beat and
humiliated prisoners.
The Times also reported that Lane McCotter, who reopened Abu
Ghraib last year, formerly ran the Utah department of corrections
but was forced to resign in 1997 when a prisoner died while shackled
naked to a chair for 16 hours.
Mr McCotter then joined a private prison security company before
John Ashcroft, US attorney-general, sent a team of prison officials
to rebuild Iraq's criminal justice system. Mr McCotter left Iraq
when Abu Ghraib, a notorious torture centre under Saddam Hussein,
reopened for US-held captives in September.
"There is no question that abuses take place in US prisons. It's
the best-kept secret in the system," says Herbert Hoelter, director
of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a
prison-reform organisation.
"The buzzword for the prison warden is population management," he
says. "When you go to American correctional association conventions,
it's all about technology and stun-guns and barbed wire, not
care."
Nearly 2.1m people are held in US prisons today - an
incarceration rate five to 10 times greater than that of any other
democracy.
"Some people say there is the same level and type of abuse in US
prisons [as in Iraq]. There is not," says Jamie Fellner of Human
Rights Watch. "There is certainly abuse in US prisons, but the
similarities with Abu Ghraib deal with the failure of leadership
command or incidents where senior staff look the other way, which is
taken as tacit approval."
The "lack of scrutiny and extreme secrecy that surrounds what
goes on inside of prisons" tends to obscure the picture, Ms Fellner
says.
Roderick Johnson, who served a three-year prison sentence in
Texas' Allred Prison, said guards laughed at his complaints of
repeated rape by other inmates.
"I was approached by gangs in prison and raped hundreds of times.
I reported it nine times and each time the administration ignored
me," Mr Johnson says. "They humiliated prisoners by stripping us
down and making us stand around naked. There is a lot of abuse but
there are no pictures to show like in Iraq."
Mike Viesca, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice, said: "We pursue our mission without the use of
intimidation or inhumane
treatment."
