Prison Torture American Style

 

You don’t have to be an avid collector of prison statistics or addicted to film and television series about life in American penitentiaries and jails – local, state and federal – to know what a “shiv” is. To know that most such houses of incarceration are de facto racially segregated, that affiliating with a gang in may such facilities is often necessary for “protection”… but fulfilling gang directives can wind up keeping an inmate behind bars for well beyond the original sentence. 

For those unable to afford first-rate legal counsel, who are assigned a public defender with way too many cases to represent anyone on a fully competent basis, the trend to “cop a plea” (regardless of guilt or innocence) and get a shorter sentence vs getting tried and almost always facing a much, much longer period of incarceration, is simply “how the system works.” Thus, prosecutors become the effective judge, jury and executioner. It gets worse when you add cops and DA’s without a moral compass.

For example, Philadelphia’s police department, in full complicity with the district attorney, was proud of its conviction rate… lots of folks getting very long sentences, even winding up on death row. But a little digging from the local press unveiled a pattern of withholding exonerating evidence, planting “evidence” and knowingly securing false accusatory testimony. The crimes went off their books, but the real perpetrators still roam free. It got so bad that a Conviction Integrity Unit was organized, initially focusing on death row inmates. So far, 25 convicted death row inmates have been exonerated and released.

So, we have a prison system, costing about $40K/year average to house inmates, where a nation with 4% of the world’s population houses 25% of the world’s inmates. We have a system where, unless you are sufficiently well-heeled to afford a first-rate defense, you are likely to be shoved into a system where a plea bargain, guilty or innocent, is a very likely result. Those accused without funds are intimidated into pleading guilty because they do not believe that the system is geared to find innocence.

Then, once incarcerated, inmates face rape, assault, extortion from fellow inmates and occasionally from unfettered guards. And if the noise, foul food, the stench, physical danger and discomfort of subhuman incarceration were not enough, add the uncaring risk of COVID spreading like wildfire throughout the system. No way out. Inferior treatment and prevention. But wait, there’s more.

Well beyond former Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s now abandoned two thousand inmate tent city jail, where temperatures often soared and remained in triple digits for days if not weeks, inmates facing the searing heat from advancing global warming all across the United States… while only a few have air conditioning even as temperatures rise to medical threat levels. 

As so many in this country now know, places that never faced such sustained searing heat before are routinely subjected to dangerous, life-threatening temperatures. Where air conditioning was never needed before, it has now become a life-saving necessity. For prisoners, who cannot run out to a fire hydrant to cool off, lying in a sweat-soaked bunk in a stultifying and stagnant cell in triple digit temperatures, it is just one more level of hell that they must endure… if they survive.

Kristin Toussaint, writing for the August 17th FastCompany.com, expounds further: “Extreme heat in prisons has been an issue for years. In 2014, a University of Texas School of Law report found that inside Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) facilities, the heat index during summer can exceed 149 degrees Fahrenheit (heat index measures how hot it feels, with humidity included; a heat index at or above 103 degrees Fahrenheit can lead to dangerous heat disorders like heat stroke or heat exhaustion with prolonged exposure). To this day, out of 99 TDCJ units in operation, only 30 have air-conditioning in all areas; 49 have air-conditioning in ‘some’ housing areas, a TDCJ spokesperson says, and 20 have no air-conditioning in housing areas at all…

“This heat can be deadly—both from overheating and physical health complications, and the mental toll it can take; Lance Lowry, the former head of the Texas correctional officer’s union, told The Marshall Project [as set forth in their fall, 2017 publication entitled Cooking Them to Death: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons] that the number of attempted suicides among prisoners usually increases in the summer. As heat gets more extreme, prison facilities across the country are underprepared for this threat, leaving an already vulnerable community even more exposed to the dangerous effects of climate change.

“It’s difficult to know just how well—or how many—prisons and jails are equipped to deal with extreme heat, because there are so many correctional jurisdictions spread throughout the U.S. ‘It means that you have not only an incredible range of diversity across the country from the standpoint of what got built when and how, but also what rules apply and who’s actually administering things,’ says Daniel Holt, who worked for years as a criminal defense lawyer and wrote a paper while a visiting scholar at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law about the issue of heat in prisons and jails.” Climate change has raised the cruelty within American houses of detention to unprecedented levels. We have too many inmates in increasingly intolerable prisons. Either the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution means something… or it doesn’t. Either the American people have a heart. Or they don’t. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and who speaks for the masses of incarcerated American prisoners, some innocent and most guilty, if not the citizens who support the system that put them into intolerably cruel detention facilities?