Somewhat stale news to some people, but fresh and shocking to most:
When Albuquerque, N.M., lawyer Paul Livingston first saw the now-infamous photos of the naked Iraqi prisoner being menaced by American soldiers with dogs in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib Prison, he immediately thought of Virginia.
Livingston represents 66 of 108 New Mexico inmates shipped to Virginia’s Wallens Ridge prison in 1999. The cases, he says, involve inmates who were non-violent offenders and have since been released. Nevertheless, Virginia prison guards beat them, shot them with stun guns and rubber bullets, slammed them against floors and walls, chained them to their beds for days at a time, subjected them to racist verbal abuse, and threatened them with sodomy and vicious dogs. This was done as a matter of policy, Livingston says, "just to show them who was boss and how terrified they should be."
From Abu Ghraib in Virginia
Abuse of Iraqi inmates follows a pattern established in Southern prisons
By Laura LaFay
Southern Exposure 32 (Winter 2005)
Southern Exposure / Southern Studies
www.southernstudies.org/reports/LaFay3-WEB.htm
And continuing...
But while the Abu Ghraib abuse photos provoked international outrage and apologies from President George W. Bush, published reports of incidents in Virginia and other states have left both the president and the public largely unconcerned. Alan Elsner, who discusses Virginia prison abuses at length in his recently published book, Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons, points out that a videotape made by Texas correctional officials when Bush was the state’s governor in 1996 shows guards using dogs and stun guns to torment naked prisoners as they crawled on the ground.
And
David Fahti, a lawyer for the National Prison Project who litigated on behalf of the Connecticut inmates sent to Wallens Ridge, was not surprised when he heard that Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, is a Virginia correctional officer.
"I don’t think it’s an accident," says Fahti. "Unfortunately, what we’re seeing in the U.S. prisons in Iraq is not qualitatively different from what goes on in American prisons on a fairly routine basis.