Torture in US Prisons
Four Custom Therapeutic [sic] Modules delivered to State
prison at Walpole (Massachusetts Correctional Institution-
Cedar Junction, formerly known as MCI-Walpole)
In March 2005, a UK Deborah Davis Channel 4 report titled, "Torture, Inc., America's Brutal Prisons" highlighted the horrors, including prisoners savaged by dogs, brutally shocked with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals, harmed by stun guns, beaten, stripped naked and abused in various other ways. Sound familiar? Welcome to mainland Guantanamo.
"It's terrible to watch some of the videos," witnessing torture, at times resulting in death. Routinely, guards yell at and abuse prisoners, "ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl." If they don't "drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stomps on his back." Another man screams when a dog bit his lower leg.
One other has a broken ankle, can't crawl fast enough so gets jabbed with a stun gun on his buttocks. Hours later his whole body still shakes. Men line up across the cellblock, guards standing over them shouting, prodding, kicking, and beating, their humiliation captured on video. The images are horrifyingly brutal, reminders of Guantanamo and Baghdad's Abu Ghraib. They're as commonplace in America, but unreported except by Channel 4 UK, calling it "wholesale torture taking place inside the US prison system," uncovered by a four-month investigation, not based on rumor or suspicion. Throughout America, videos and other solid evidence confirm it, what US major media reports won't reveal.
In most states, prison regulations mandate that guards videotape "use of force operations" like cell searches, in theory to show proper procedures were used. Most often, they reveal otherwise, clear evidence of inmate abuses - "a shocking insight into the reality of life inside" US prisons. Even the best of them are harsh, the worst hellish, Davis explaining that videos are "terrible" to watch, saying:
"you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one horrible scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair.' His hands and feet are shackled. There's a strap across his chest. His head rolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet."
He's being punished for having a pillowcase on his head in his cell and refusing to remove it. Why? He has a long history of schizophrenia, yet he's restrained for 16 hours. Two hours later, "he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment....We found 20 (other cases of) prisoners who've died in the past few years" after being brutally restrained, what American media won't report.
