The degree to which the US has degraded itself can be gleaned from the fact
that the treatise "Democracy in America" (1835 ) was the outcome of de
Tocqueville's travels in the US to survey the prison system. At the time it was
considered by far more humane than any of its European counterparts. Today, the
situation is dramatically reversed.


The Rampart Scandal and the Criminal Justice System
in Los Angeles County.
By Erwin
Chemerinsky: Guild Practitioner, 57:121 (2001)
"This is conduct associated with the most repressive
dictators and police states... and judges must share responsibility when
innocent people are convicted."
“No
single reform can be sufficient. Reform is not an event, but a process that
will take many years to complete.

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MORE:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27433920/

____
Torture Inc. - Americas Brutal
Prisons
Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle
Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails
explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

By Deborah Davies (2005)

They are just some of the victims
of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we
uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to
watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in
action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.


The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods,
stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The
guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl.
‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground
fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched
scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.


Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a
guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through
his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.


READ MORE:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm


____
The American Prison and the Normalization
of Torture

By H. Bruce Franklin

The
prison has become a central institution in American society, integral to our
politics, economy, and culture. Between 1976 and 2000, the United States built
on average a new prison each week and the number of imprisoned Americans
increased tenfold. With a current prison and jail population of over two
million, America has become the uncontested world leader in incarceration.
Prison has made the threat of torture part of everyday life for millions of
individuals in the United States, especially the 6.9 million currently
incarcerated or otherwise under the control of the penal system. More
insidiously, our prison system has helped make torture a normal, legitimate,
even routine part of American culture.

Imprisonment itself, even when
relatively benign, is arguably a form of torture. This is implicit in our
society using prison as the most dire legal form of both "punishment" and
"deterrence," except for execution. Moreover, in the typical American prison,
designed and run to maximize degradation, brutalization, and punishment, overt
torture is the norm. Beatings, electric shock, prolonged exposure to heat and
even immersion in scalding water, sodomy with riot batons, nightsticks,
flashlights, and broom handles, shackled prisoners forced to lie in their own
excrement for hours or even days, months of solitary confinement, rape and
murder by guards or prisoners instructed by guards--all are everyday occurrences
in the American prison system.

READ MORE:
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/brucefranklin.html


____
What Goes On
There Is More Like Gulags Of Centuries Ago.
Regarding the imprisonment of "Birther" Lt. Commander
Walter Fitzpatrick, III, in Monroe County, Tennessee.

ACLU (2011)

READ MORE:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72546279/