A high-level commission yesterday began a year-long examination of violence, sexual abuse, overcrowding and inhumane treatment in U.S. prisons, in an investigation provoked in part by reports of misconduct by U.S. corrections officers assigned to serve in military detention centers overseas.
The privately organized commission, which has attracted interest in its work from the Justice Department and key lawmakers, is headed by former attorney general Nicholas deB. Katzenbach and John J. Gibbons, a former federal appeals court judge. Its aim is to recommend prison reforms from local to federal levels after holding at least four public hearings around the country.
Statistics cited by the commission chart growing problems in U.S. prisons, where the inmate population has quadrupled in the past two decades to more than 2 million: More than 34,000 assaults were committed by prisoners against other inmates in a 12-month period covering parts of 1999 and 2000; the number of prisoner assaults against staff in that period was 27 percent higher than the previous 12 months.
More than a million people were sexually assaulted in prisons over the past two decades, the commission said. Eleven inmates died in restraint chairs in the 1990s. The commission also said corrections officers have reduced life expectancies and higher rates of alcoholism than other law enforcement officers.
Only three states -- New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois -- have independent commissions charged with reporting on prison conditions, and they lack authority to impose reforms, the commission said. No mandatory national standards exist for prisons, many of which are now run by private contractors.
"We seem to have a gap between our cherished ideals about justice and the realities of the prison environment," said Katzenbach, who served under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson....
That would probably be something of an understatement, yes?
So let me get this straight-ish: a commission with no authority whatsoever over any prison system anywhere is going to study the problem for a year and then make recommendations to ... essentially nobody. The states will then say, "Well, thanks really quite a lot," and serenely ignore them.
Thing is, it's not as though people don't know and understand the problems in US prisons today. It's just that there's absolutely no will -- and, frankly, no money -- to do anything about them. Prisoners are foremost among this country's many disposable people. If you're brutalized in prison, or commit brutality, nobody outside of your friends and relatives actually cares. For various reasons, prison offenses are among the least likely to be reported; the numbers cited above are probably a vast understatement.
It's not that this survey is a waste of time. It would just be nice if they had some sort of concrete plan about what to do with the inevitably depressing results they're going to get.
Posted by iain at March 02, 2005 02:35 AM
