OxBlog

# Posted 8:20 AM by Patrick Belton

ONE SORELY NEGLECTED aspect of the Al Ghraib prison mess, which I don't believe either mainstream media or bloggers have yet devoted anything approximating enough attention to, is the reflection it casts on prisons here at home.*

When the Washington Post profiled Specialist Charles Graner, the face behind many of the most brutal images to come out of Al Ghraib, one of the most startling revelations to come out of the article was that this was his day job. Graner, a reservist, had been employed between the two Gulf Wars at Fayette County Prison and at State Correctional Institution-Greene in southwestern Pennsylvania. Images from how Graner and the other guards treated prisoners there rings eerily familiar to the images we have been treated to in the news over the past month. According to the Post's David Finkel and Christian Davenport,

In 1992, [Graner] was working at a county prison in Pennsylvania with guards who acknowledge beating up prisoners as a means of control

According to allegations which led to the firing of two dozen guards in 1998, at Greene guards as a matter of course 'beat prisoners, spit in their food, showered them with racial epithets and wrote "KKK" in one beaten prisoner's blood'.

'In 1994, [Graner] made a fellow prison guard [named Robert Tajc] sick by spraying Mace into his coffee.'

'In 1998, when he was working as a guard in a state prison, he was accused by one inmate [Horatio Nimley] of slipping a razor blade into his food.' 'Nimley, who is serving time for burglary, takes a spoonful [of mashed potatoes]. His mouth fills with blood. He spits out a razor blade. He screams for help. At first the guards ignore him. Then they take him to the nurse. And then they punch him, kick him and slam him to the floor, and when he yells, "Stop, stop," one of the guards says, "Shut up, nigger, before we kill you."'

Prison abuse in America doesn't receive nearly the exposure it should - whether because of misguided subconcious notions that prisoners deserve whatever comes to them, the reluctance of broader rights organisations to associate themselves with their causes, or a more simple lack of resources and attention to the problem.

But Al Ghraib - if it is to have any beneficial repercussions apart from serving as a recruiting poster for organisations and movements in each country which seek portray the United States, not governments such as Saddam's, as the chief enemy of human dignity - can at least provide an opportunity to examine and address this issue, which mocks human dignity and our own nobler commitments to the fair rule of law in our penal, judicial, and police institutions.

Of organisations which have begun to bring the issue to a larger national stage, the efforts of Human Rights Watch are worth noting (I'm happy to use this space to draw the attention to the work of any other groups our readers might know about). Slate has covered the issue, too, from the perspective of prison rape.

More is needed. Much more.

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*(By 'here', incidentally, I mean the United States, not England; a ditto referent for 'home', though that's not intended to disparage against a country that's often made me feel warmly welcome as a half-decade's resident.)

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