SCI Greene
Home-grown prison torture
Philadelphia, May 12--A former death row prisoner spoke
out at a media conference here today about his experiences
with Charles A. Graner, Jr., an SCI Greene prison guard
reportedly involved in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war.
Nicholas Yarris, an exonerated Pennsy vania death row
prisoner at SCI who was released on Jan. 16, said he had
numerous encounters with Graner, describing the guard as
"violent, abusive, arrogant and mean-spirited" toward
inmates. However the real issue is not the individual,
Yarris stressed, but "how the U.S. is training guards in
these maximum security hell-holes like SCI Greene and then
unleashing them on another peoples' society."
By Betsey Piette
Philadelphia
In Aaron McGruder's comic strip "The
Boondocks" May 10, the character Caesar tells his friend Huey,
"Rumsfeld says the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is 'un-Amer ican.'"
To which Huey replies: "Really? A bunch of men stripped,
humiliated and abused physically and sexually? Sounds like
every prison I've ever heard about in America."
This comparison is no joke. As news surfaced about the U.S.
torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, it was revealed that
two of the reservists involved are U.S. prison guards.
Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick is a corrections officer at
Buckingham Cor rec tional Center in Virginia. He has been
linked to the death of one Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib.
Charles A. Graner Jr., one of six military police officers
charged with supervising the torture of Iraqi prisoners, and
who appears in some of the most lurid photos, has been a
corrections officer at Pennsylvania's State Correc tional
Institution at Greene since 1996.
SCI Greene, a super-maximum-security prison in western
Pennsylvania, houses the overwhelming majority of the state's
death row prisoners, including political prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal. He has published many accounts of abuse and torture
of prisoners at the facility.
Reports of prisoner abuse have plagued SCI Greene since it
opened less than a decade ago as the "shining jewel in the
crown" of the Pennsylvania Depart ment of Correction. In an
article written from death row, Abu-Jamal described SCI Greene
as a "bright, shining hell" where pris oners were subject to
arbitrary cruelties.
Located in an isolated rural area, 93 percent of the
prison's staff is white, while the vast majority of inmates are
African American or Latino. The level of racial abuse is so
notorious that officers at other institutions in the state
prison system reportedly refer to it as the "Good Ol' Boy
Jail."
Two years after Graner was hired at SCI Greene, the prison
was at the center of an abuse scandal because guards routinely
beat and humiliated prisoners. Prison officials--citing privacy
laws--refuse to reveal whether Graner was disciplined in that
case.
Meanwhile this supervisor of torture of Iraqi prisoners is
still on Pennsylvania's payroll, receiving salary and
benefits.
The rule, not the exception
While Rumsfeld and Bush claim the torture at Abu Ghraib was
"an isolated affair" and "un-American," documented brutality at
prisons across the U.S. exposes this as yet another
administration lie.
According to Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the
National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union,
horrific abuses--some similar to those revealed in Iraq--occur
regularly in U.S. prisons with little or no attention.
"We certainly see many of these same kinds of things here in
the United States," said Gotsch. "This office has been involved
in cases in which prisoners have been raped by guards and
humiliated. But we don't talk about it much in America and we
certainly don't hear the president expressing outrage."
From 1995-2000, while Bush served as Texas governor, that
state led the country in state-sponsored executions. In 1996,
guards at the Brazoria County jail staged a "drug raid" on
inmates that was videotaped for training purposes. The tape
showed several inmates forced to strip and lie on the ground; a
police dog attacking prisoners, biting one on the leg; guards
prodding prisoners with stun guns and forcing them to crawl on
the ground; and guards dragging injured inmates face-down back
to their cells.
"The levels of abuse, the humiliation and degradation, the
lack of oversight and accountability ... there were many
parallels with Iraq," said Michelle Deitch, who teaches
criminal justice at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public
Affairs at the University of Texas.
Despite the military's claim that the torture at Abu Ghraib
was the result of "poorly prepared and untrained" military
police officers, it seems more likely that the training Graner
and Frederick received in U.S. prisons contributed to the
problem.
Reprinted from the May 20, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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