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The Everyday Brutality of America's Prisons - The New Republic

The document discusses issues of violence and poor conditions in prisons across the US. It details a Justice Department report finding severe violations of prisoners' rights in Alabama prisons, including widespread violence, sexual abuse, and understaffing. It also discusses investigations finding hundreds of deaths in jails in Oregon and Washington due to preventable causes like suicide.

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45 views4 pages

The Everyday Brutality of America's Prisons - The New Republic

The document discusses issues of violence and poor conditions in prisons across the US. It details a Justice Department report finding severe violations of prisoners' rights in Alabama prisons, including widespread violence, sexual abuse, and understaffing. It also discusses investigations finding hundreds of deaths in jails in Oregon and Washington due to preventable causes like suicide.

Uploaded by

Matt Dredd
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Everyday Brutality of

America’s Prisons
It's not just Alabama. Inmates across the country are living—and dying—in horri c
conditions.

EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES


Matt Ford / April 5, 2019

Earlier this week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a
summary of its findings on the state of Alabama’s prisons. The accounts are
stomach-churning: The New York Times noted that one prisoner had been lying
dead for so long that “his face was flattened,” while another “was tied up and
tortured for two days.” A dive into the 53-page report reveals yet more horror. One
prisoner was doused with bleach and beaten with a broken mop handle. Another
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was attacked with shaving cream so hot that it caused chemical burns, requiring
treatment from an outside hospital.

It’s hardly news that American prisons and jails can be dangerous places. But the
Justice Department’s report mirrors other recent accounts of inmate deaths and
violence across the country that, taken together, paint a grim picture of the
brutality that occurs behind prison walls—and the horrifying consequences of
America’s indifference to it.

Two years in the making, the federal investigation of men’s prisons in Alabama
found them plagued with “severe, systemic, and exacerbated” violations of
prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights. Rates of prisoner-on-prisoner violence have
roughly doubled in the state over the past five years, with a homicide rate eight
times the national average. Guards told federal investigators that half to three-
quarters of prisoners have some kind of improvised weapon. “A weapon that was
essentially a small sword was recovered at St. Clair in 2017,” the report said.

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Sexual violence is also ubiquitous. The report found that prison staff “accept the
high level of violence and sexual abuse ... as a normal course of business,
including acquiescence to the idea that prisoners will be subjected to sexual abuse
as a way to pay debts accrued to other prisoners.” Alabama officials routinely
declared reports of sexual violence as “unsubstantiated” if the survivor declined
to press charges, even if he named his attacker and there was other evidence to
support the allegation. The Justice Department also found that officials
discouraged prisoner reports of sexual assault by regularly dismissing allegations
as consensual “homosexual activity.”

The Justice Department attributes this violence to an ouroboros of understaffing


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and overcrowding. independent
The report foundjournalism and subscribe
that Alabama’s today. is understaffed
prison system
by more than two-thirds. Even the most well-staffed prison, with 75 percent of the
necessary employees, was described as “dangerously understaffed.” To make up
the shortfall, prison officials regularly force guards to work an additional four
hours past their twelve-hour shifts. Meanwhile, investigators estimated that
Alabama had a prison occupancy rate of 182 percent of its capacity. Though the
state has taken some efforts to reduce the number of nonviolent prisoners in the
system, facility closures kept the overall occupancy levels roughly the same.

This report came shortly after a damning investigation by Oregon Public


Broadcasting, KUOW, and the Northwest News Network found that at least 306
people have died in Oregon and Washington jails since 2008, often from suicide
and other preventable causes. But the actual total is unclear because officials in
both states haven’t comprehensively tracked how many people die in the
government’s custody. “State lawmakers who could improve funding, staff
training or standards have taken little action,” the report said. “They say they are
in the dark about how many people have even died in jail, let alone how to prevent
those deaths. As a result, long-festering problems avoid the spotlight.”

Jails hold a far greater number of people than prisons, and often include people
who are awaiting trial and thus haven’t been found guilty of a crime. They also
function as America’s social institution of last resort—a place where people
struggling with drug addiction or severe episodes of mental illnesses are sent
when all else fails. Chicago’s Cook County Jail, one of the nation’s largest pre-trial
detention centers, is also effectively the largest mental health hospital in the
United States. It’s no surprise that funneling at-risk individuals into a hostile
environment can have fatal consequences.

The problem isn’t isolated, either. Four hundred and twenty-eight prisoners died
in Florida’s prisons in 2017, amounting to a 20 percent leap over previous years. In
Mississippi, 16 prisoners died in the state’s custody last August alone. Some of
them may have died from natural causes or unpreventable problems. But that’s
not always the case. Arizona regulators testified last month that multiple
prisoners in state facilities had died from inadequate healthcare services by a
private provider. Perhaps the most famous death in recent years was Sandra
Bland, a 28-year-old woman who committed suicide in a Texas jail after she was
arrested during a routine traffic stop in 2015. Bland warned officials during her
intake procedure that she had made suicide attempts in the past, but they took no
extraordinary measures.
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How widespread is the problem? It’s hard to tell because the United States
generally does a poor job of collecting criminal justice data. The Justice
Department faulted Alabama prison officials for misrecording apparent
homicides in their facilities, making them seem safer than they actually are in
government figures. The Pacific Northwest news organizations also found that
neither Oregon nor Washington comprehensively track deaths because jail
officials instead report their facilities’ statistics to federal officials—but they do so
on a voluntary basis.

This willful ignorance is almost as troubling as the deaths themselves. It suggests


that too many states see prison and jail brutality as somehow normal. Not every
death in custody may be preventable, but a great many of them are. When public
officials don’t act with the appropriate haste to save people under their protection,
too many prisoners face what amounts to a death sentence—one for which they
were never charged and never tried.

Matt Ford @fordm

Matt Ford is a sta writer at The New Republic.

Read More: Law, Justice, Politics, Alabama, Prisons, Criminal Justice Reform, Criminal Justice
Statistics

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