Stop Abuse in Criminal Justice - Demand Independent Inspections of US Prisons and Jails
- by: Susan V
- recipient: US Department of State Secretary, John Kerry
The ACLU says that over 80,000 prison inmates are held in solitary confinement in the United States every day. Some of these are children. And yet the US continues to bar or restrict UN inspection of its prisons.
According to a Guardian report, UN Torture expert Juan Mendez has been waiting for two years for the US State Department to help him gain proper access to state and federal prisons.
Mendez has expressed special concern over the use of solitary confinement for underage offenders, a punishment he says is cruel for adults and “particularly harmful for children” who should never be exposed to such torment.
“It’s not rare” for inmates to spend up to 23 hours a day in solitary for as many as 30 years, says Mendez, who adds that he expects the US to secure invitations from both state and federal prisons. But so far the only invitation he’s received was to visit Guantanamo under terms so restrictive he could not accept.
This torture has gone on far too long and needs to be properly inspected, exposed and abolished. Tell Dept. of State Secretary John Kerry to allow nonrestrictive UN inspection of all state and federal prisons.
We, the undersigned, oppose the use of torture of prison imates and insist that the US allow UN inspectors full access for inspections.
Whiteout Press’s Mark Wachtler points out the hypocrisy of the US banning or restricting these inspections, noting that “American politicians in both the White House and Congress have for decades used the act of denying UN inspectors as grounds for sanctions and even invasion and regime change.”
Most disturbing are reports of children punished with solitary confinement. As Mendez points out, this punishment is “particularly harmful for children because of their state of development and their special needs.”
Another issue involving incarcerated children is the research at Rikers revealing that the majority of adolescents incarcerated there have suffered some degree of brain injury, and yet it has been reported that these children are being repeatedly beaten, often in the head, by guards.
Reported in New York World in 2013, a 2912 Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) study found “50 percent of male juveniles incarcerated at Rikers have experienced significant traumatic brain injuries. The rate among young women was even higher at 65 percent,” while the average rate among Americans is only about 8.5%.
These brain injured inmates are the ones most likely to “run afoul of jail rules and receive infractions,” noted Dr. Home Venters, assistant commissioner of New York City’s Correctional Health Services, during a Board of Corrections meeting. “We often end up giving someone a mental health diagnosis, who does not have a mental health problem, but rather TBI.”
So not only are these ill children being misdiagnosed and incarcerated, they are being punished and tortured for behavioral problems for which they are not being given the proper rehabilitative support.
And it’s not only children who suffer behavioral problems from head injuries that make it harder for them to avoid punishment in correctional systems.
According to the New York World report, the CDC “called traumatic brain injuries in prisons and jails a nationally unrecognized problem,. with “as many as 87 percent of inmates report having experienced some kind of head injury, though the rate is generally believed to be around 60 percent on average.”
The report goes on to explain that “Inmates with these injuries can experience cognitive difficulties that include problems with impulse control. These may explain how they entered the criminal justice in the first place and why they may struggle disproportionately in a correctional setting.”
This recent study, along with reports in the New York Times and Firedog Lake that “Prison Officers Routinely Brutalize Mentally Ill Inmates at Rikers Island But Are Never Punished” provide even more justification for Mendez’s insistence on gaining full access to our state and federal prisons, and without further delay.
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