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U.S. Prisons Prisons remained overcrowded in 2000: twenty-two states and the federal prison system operated at 100 percent or more of their highest capacity. Overcrowding contributed to the growth of private prisons: according to the Department of Justice privately-operated facilities held 5.5 percent of all state prisoners and 2.5 percent of federal prisoners. Most inmates had scant opportunities for work, training, education, treatment or counseling because of taxpayer resistance to increasing the already astonishing U.S. $41 billion spent annually on corrections and because of the prevailing punitive ideology that applauds harsh prison conditions. Idle inmates with long sentences, little hope of early release (and hence little incentive for good behavior) and jammed into poorly equipped facilities, sometimes became violent: in 1998 (the most recent year for which data was available), fifty-nine inmates were killed by other inmates, and assaults, fights, and rapes left 6,750 inmates and 2,331 correctional staff injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Rivalry and tension between race-based prison gangs lay behind many individual assaults and sometimes escalated into violent riots. Men in prison were subject to prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, whose effects on the victim's psyche were serious and enduring. Inmate victims reported nightmares, deep depression, shame, loss of self-esteem, self-hatred, and considering or attempting suicide. Victims of rape, in the most extreme cases, were literally the slaves of the perpetrators, being "rented out" for sex, "sold," or even auctioned off to other inmates. Despite the devastating psychological impact of such abuse, few if any preventative measures were taken in most jurisdictions, while perpetrators were rarely punished adequately by prison officials. Over twenty thousand prisoners were confined in special super-maximum security facilities in 2000. They typically spent all their waking and sleeping hours locked alone or with a cellmate in small sometimes windowless cells from which they were released for only a few hours each week for solitary recreation or showers. Super-max prisoners had almost no access to educational or recreational activities or other sources of mental stimulation and were handcuffed, shackled and escorted by officers whenever they left their cells. Although super-max confinement was ostensibly designed to control incorrigibly violent or dangerous inmates, many inmates so confined did not meet those criteria. An inmate committed suicide at the super-max in Ohio in April, the third suicide since it opened in 1998, while draconian rules and restrictions prompted a prolonged hunger strike at the super-max in Illinois. Inmates at Wisconsin's new super-max prison filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the conditions to which they were subjected, including round-the-clock confinement in isolation, constant fluorescent lighting in their cells, twenty-four hour video monitoring that permitted female staff to watch prisoners shower and urinate, and inadequate recreation. Reports of frequent incidents of physical abuse, racial harassment and excessive use of force continued at Virginia's two super-maximum security prisons. Between January and June 2000, two inmates -- who had both been transferred from Connecticut -- died at one of these prisons, Wallens Ridge State Prison. One of the deaths was a suicide; the other occurred after the inmate had been stunned several times with a 50,000 volt electronic stun device and left in five-point restraints. New Mexican inmates transferred to Wallens Ridge in 1999 complained of gratuitous and malicious physical abuse by prison guards, including beatings and shocks from electric stun devices. In January 2000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated a preliminary investigation into their claims at the request of the New Mexico attorney general. According to the Virginia Department of Corrections, between January 1999 and June 2000, prison guards at Red Onion State Prison, Virginia's first super-max, fired 116 blank rounds and twenty-five stinger rounds of rubber pellets and discharged hand-held electronic stun devices 130 times. Most other prison systems controlled inmate fights without recourse to firearms or electric shocks. In June, three inmate bystanders at Red Onion were injured by rubber pellets when guards fired shotguns to break up an inmate scuffle. Inmates at the prison complained in 2000 of an apparently new staff practice of placing inmates in five point restraints for as long as forty-eight hours because they masturbated or displayed their genitals in front of female staff. In September, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was opening a formal investigation to determine whether inmates' constitutional rights were being violated at Red Onion. A fourteen month long Department of Justice investigation of conditions at Nassau County Jail resulted in a scathing report released in September 2000. The report said the jail had an "institutional culture that supports and promotes abuses." The documented abuses included brutal beatings by officers and officers paying inmates to beat other inmates, especially targeting sex offenders. Hampered by lack of counsel, inadequate access to legal materials and legal restrictions on inmate litigation, prisoners rarely obtained judicial relief against abusive officers, though some did. In March 2000, a county jail in Oregon paid $1.75 million to settle an excessive force lawsuit brought by an inmate who had been strapped into a restraint chair, doused with large amounts of pepper spray and subjected to choke holds. He lapsed into a coma for 71 days and suffered permanent brain damage. Criminal prosecution of brutal correctional officers was rare, and convictions in such cases even rarer. In February 2000, four guards from Florida State Prison were indicted on murder charges in connection with the July 1999 beating death of Frank Valdez. An autopsy revealed that all his ribs had been broken and there were boot marks imprinted on his body. The guards contended that Valdes injured himself. They were awaiting trial at this writing. In California, eight prison guards were acquitted in June of federal charges that they staged gladiator-style fights among inmates at Corcoran State Prison. Similarly, in November 1999, four Corcoran guards were acquitted of setting up the rape of an inmate by a notoriously violent prisoner. Independent investigations and state legislative hearings in 1998 confirmed a pattern of brutality at Corcoran and the failure of the Department of Corrections to investigate abuses and discipline those responsible. In both court cases, the authorities faced the daunting tasks of breaking through officer solidarity and a code of silence, and of prosecuting prison guards before juries drawn from the rural communities in which the guards lived-and in which prisons were a major source of employment. Over 100,000 children in the United States were confined in juvenile facilities. Many of them faced appalling conditions of abuse and neglect. In South Dakota, a class action suit was brought challenging widespread physical abuses against girls detained at the State Training School. The suit charged that guards routinely shackled youths in spread-eagled fashion after cutting off their clothes, sprayed them with pepper spray while naked, and routinely placed them in isolation for twenty-three hours each day for extended periods. Although the state government conducted an investigation of juvenile detention facilities in 1999, it did not implement any reforms to end abusive policies and practices. After twenty-seven years of litigation, the state of Louisiana agreed in September to significant changes in its juvenile detention system to protect youth from the extensively documented physical, sexual, and mental abuse that had been prevalent, and to provide youth with rehabilitative services and medical, dental, and mental health care. In May, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections moved the last remaining detainees out of the Jena Juvenile Justice Center, a for-profit institution run by the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. The move came four months after the U.S. Department of Justice's mental health expert reported that "Jena's environment is unsafe, violent and inhumane for the juveniles incarcerated there." The trend toward trying more children in the adult criminal system continued in 2000, depriving those affected of the variety of rehabilitative dispositions available in juvenile proceedings. In California, for example, voters approved a measure in March that made transfer to the adult system mandatory in some cases and gave prosecutors the final word in many others; before the measure's passage, juveniles were transferred to the adult system only after a judicial hearing. In Maryland, a public outcry over the treatment of children in adult jails, prompted in part by a Human Rights Watch report released in November 1999, led to some improvements in the education provided the incarcerated children. The Baltimore City Detention Center's school appointed additional teachers and began to offer a full school day to juveniles in the general and protective custody sections, but those held in the segregation and other sections continued to be deprived of regular classroom instruction. In Prince George's County-where youths were receiving no education at the time of Human Rights Watch's July 1998 visit-the Department of Corrections and the county board of education began to provide educational services in September 2000. In October, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice notified Maryland that it would investigate conditions of detention at the Baltimore City Detention Center. The Justice Department planned to examine whether youths were subjected to excessive periods of isolation. The investigators were also to determine whether all detainees, including youths, received adequate medical and mental health care and whether they were protected from harm. Minority youths in the United States were significantly more likely to be sent to adult courts than their white counterparts. Compared to white youths, children of color in California were 2.8 times more likely to be charged with violent crimes, 6.2 times more likely to be tried in adult court, and seven times more likely to be sentenced to prison when they were tried as adults. Sexual abuse against women by correctional officers remained widespread despite new laws prohibiting it and greater public awareness of the problem. A U.S. government study in December 1999 found pervasive allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct by corrections officers. Criminal prosecutions of abusive staff appeared to increase. Cases since December 1999 included, for example, eleven former guards and a prison official who were indicted on charges of sexually assaulting or harassing sixteen female prisoners at a county jail operated by a private corrections company; the conviction of a New Mexico jail guard on federal civil rights charges stemming from the sexual assault of jail prisoners; the sentencing of a New York jail guard to three years of probation after pleading guilty to sodomizing two female prisoners; and the sentencing of an Ohio jail officer to a four year prison term for sexually assaulting three female prisoners. In Michigan, however, legislators passed a law that took effect in March that exempted prisoners from the protection of the state civil rights act, which prohibits discrimination based on race and gender. Through this legislation, Michigan suppressed prisoners' efforts to seek redress for sexual abuse through lawsuits against the Corrections Department. In California, although a law went into effect in January that increased the criminal penalties for sexual misconduct, the state failed to ensure that women could safely report abuse. Women prisoners in one California prison, for example, claimed that their cells were ransacked and personal items damaged or taken after they reported abuse. Others reported being held in "protective" custody pending investigation of their "allegation." A federal circuit court upheld federal legislation, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, that bars lawsuits by inmates seeking damages for mental or emotional injury suffered while in custody where there is no proof of significant physical injury. Georgia inmates had filed a lawsuit alleging that in 1996 prison officers had made them remove their clothes in front a female guard, tap dance while naked and shave with an unlubricated razor. Under the court's ruling, inmates cannot sue for humiliation, mental torture or non-physical sadistic treatment by guards unless, in effect, they have broken bones or blood to show for it. This restriction on the ability of inmates to vindicate their rights in court was one of many ways in which U.S. laws and judicial mechanisms failed to meet the standards mandated by the Convention against Torture. Human Rights Watch reports on U.S. prisons:
From the California State Senate hearings on Corcoran State Prison: The following online articles discuss recent developments with regard to prisons in the United States:
The following organizations work to ensure that U.S. prisoners are treated humanely and are confined in at least minimally adequate conditions:
State and federal governmental prison sites:
Other useful sources of information on conditions, treatment, legal standards, and other issues relevant to U.S. prisons and jails:
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