America's Abu Ghraibs: Prisoner Abuse in the US

Despite the outcry over the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib, neither elected officials nor the public seem particularly worried about similar prisoner mistreatment here in the US by guards who are increasingly beyond the control of prison authorities.

The footage is not easy to watch: In one clip, a prisoner screams as an attack dog mauls his leg; in another, a prisoner with a broken ankle gets zapped in the buttocks with a stun gun because he's not crawling along the floor quickly enough. These aren't the infamous videos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. They were taken in 1996, at the Brazoria County Detention Center outside of Houston. "Welcome to Texas," one guard announces as he literally drags a prisoner across the floor. "Enjoy the ride. It's like Astroworld." Eventually, the tapes ended up on the nightly news, prompting a probe by the FBI, jail sentences for two guards, and a class-action lawsuit that procured, for Texas prisoners, $2.2 million in damages.

The episode was not unusual. Just last month, another videotape of apparent abuse became public; in this one, two inmates at a California youth prison lie seemingly defenseless on the floor while guards assault them, first with fists and later with chemical sprays (the guards claimed they acted in self-defense). And, thanks to a prison population that's growing faster than jail space can accommodate it, the privatization of the prison industry, and a weakening of the laws designed to protect inmates, things only appear to be getting worse. What makes all these trends possible, of course, is vast public indifference: For all the legitimate concern over the abuses in Iraq, neither elected officials nor the public seem particularly worried that similar abuses happen all the time right here at home.

Although protection from cruel and unusual punishment is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for most of the nation's history, the advocates of fair treatment for prison inmates have fought a lonely and halting battle. In fact, as Harvard University historian Rebecca M. McLennan explains in a forthcoming book, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, in 1865, it was the Thirteenth Amendment itself - which explicitly exempted prisoners from its prohibition on slavery - that effectively stripped convicted criminals of nearly all rights. At least, that's how the courts interpreted prisoner cases until the 1960s and 1970s, when the Warren Court ruled there was "no iron curtain" between inmates and the Constitution - that some basic human rights existed even behind prison bars. Judges began taking the prisoner lawsuits that their predecessors had refused to hear. It was through the lawsuits this ruling spawned that some of the most egregious prisoner abuses of the last half-century were exposed and, to some extent, remedied. In fact, in many instances, federal judges determined abuses to be so widespread that they effectively took over management of the prisons themselves.

Arguably, the most sweeping - and certainly the most drawn out - of these decrees governed the corrections system in Texas for nearly two decades. The saga began in 1972, when an inmate named David Ruiz scrawled a 30-page complaint about civil rights violations at his facility and passed them to a judge through his attorney. After a marathon trial, Judge William Wayne Justice declared in 1980 that Texas' entire corrections system was unconstitutional. Over the next two decades, Justice would become the de facto chief administrator of Texas prisons, forcing the state to spend billions constructing new prisons and to end the practice of deputizing inmates to guard other inmates - a practice under which these "guards" routinely raped, beat, and tortured their fellow prisoners.