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And here are the reasons why it's good news:
Today's NY Times:
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December 19, 2003
PRISONS
Detainees' Abuse Is Detailed
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
A report released yesterday by the Department of Justice's inspector general concluded that at one federal prison in Brooklyn, some staff members physically abused many illegal immigrants arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks, taunted them and illegally taped their meetings with lawyers.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants in the New York area were detained after the attacks. Almost all were found to have no tangible connection to terrorism; many have been deported or have left the country, officials said.
The report drew its conclusions from interviews with more than 30 detainees, dozens of prison officers and supervisors, and hundreds of videotapes.
The videotapes, which investigators found after they were told by prison employees that the tapes no longer existed, showed staff members slamming chained detainees into walls and twisting their elbows, often while the detainees were in chains, handcuffs or otherwise not resisting orders, the report said.
The report said there were accusations that guards smashed a detainee's face into a T-shirt taped to a wall. The shirt had an American flag and the words "These colors don't run!"
In other cases, the report said, prison officials illegally taped detainees' conversations with their lawyers. In a few cases, after talking with their lawyers through a solid partition and in the presence of prison staff members, some male detainees were needlessly stripped naked and searched in front of female employees, the report said.
The report recommended that the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the Brooklyn detention center, discipline 10 employees whom it identified and several others whom it did not.
A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to three calls for comment.
A Justice Department spokesman, Mark Corallo, said the department's civil rights division and the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York would review the report to decide whether to prosecute.
Nancy Chang, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department last year on behalf of several detainees, praised the report and called on prosecutors to use the videotapes to prosecute prison employees who abused detainees.
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Did you see the tee-shirt taped to the wall bit -- where they would smash prisoner's faces? Just to let you know, this is common. In Chicago, the police paint targets on the wall in the interrogation room. A punch to the face can get an officer in trouble. Being slammed into the wall looks like a fall. There are more clumsy people in Chicago jails than you would believe. So, this kind of abuse is "par for the course."
But, taping the conversations with lawyers is truly eggregious. The only thing mitigating the hell that prisons/jails are is the ability to get out through the courts and your lawyers. Limiting that is sealing the lid on the dank pit.
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