Advocates: Worry about prisons closer to home

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), May 12, 2004 by Lawrence Hurley

Prison reform advocates in Maryland are hoping that the fallout from the controversial Iraqi prisoner abuse photographs will help highlight the condition of prisons closer to home.

Civil rights lawyers involved in long-running litigation over the treatment of detainees at Baltimore City Detention Center claimed yesterday that the horrific images broadcast around the world, showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and abused at the Abu Ghraib complex, illustrate the prevailing culture within American prisons.

The crisis in Iraq is no surprise to anyone who does prison work here, said Sally Dworak-Fisher, an attorney for the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center, who works on the detention center case. It's the same mentality.

The U.S. Department of Justice itself noted numerous violations of prisoner's rights at the detention center, which houses pretrial detainees, in a 2002 report, said Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington-based National Prison Project. Alexander is also involved in the Baltimore litigation.

Among the violations were the much-publicized problems with heat control in the women's detention facility, where the temperature in the summer would sometimes be as high as 120 degrees on the heat index.

Multiple air conditioning units were installed in the facility last year following a hearing at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore as part of an ongoing consent decree.

Despite this, Alexander's assessment of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services - which operates the Baltimore pretrial facility - is not positive.

I wouldn't say that the department of corrections in Maryland is worse than others, but there's nothing to make someone from Maryland feel good, she said.

Alan Elsner, a senior journalist with the Reuters news agency who has just written a book on American prisons, Gates of Injustice, also drew parallels between American prisons and the notorious facility in Iraq.

He claimed that some of the practices documented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as stripping prisoners naked and threatening them with dogs, are often used as management tools or as punishment in American prisons.

The U.S. prison system is a big human rights problem and is an embarrassment, he said yesterday. It's become a problem for a country that seeks to promote itself as a champion of human rights.

Elsner, who is appearing in Baltimore at a Public Justice Center event tonight to speak about his book, admitted his experience of Maryland prisons is limited, but said the system in many ways reflects national trends.

The disproportionate number of black inmates and the surge in prison population over the last two decades are the most prominent of those, he said.

Elsner's book questions the policies that have led to 2 million Americans being incarcerated, to the extent that, by the 1990s, the United States, with only five percent of the world's population, had a quarter of the world's prisoners.

He also makes liberal use of statistics in describing the prison boom, noting that Texas now has 144 facilities housing 150,000 inmates compared with 12 penal farms housing 14,000 inmates in the 1960s.

In addressing racial disparities, he uses Baltimore as an example, writing that in 1980, 18 white juveniles and 86 black juveniles were arrested for selling drugs.

By 1990, just 13 whites were arrested, compared with 1,304 blacks, according to the book.

The ACLU's Alexander did note, however, that improvements appear to be on the horizon in Maryland under Mary Ann Saar, who was appointed secretary of the corrections department by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

Prisons spokesman Mark Vernarelli, speaking generally about the state of the department, also stressed yesterday that reform is under way.

He pointed to Project Restart, which will seek to prepare inmates for their return to society through education, drug treatment, and other services, as a key part of that process.

Vernarelli said the program is set to begin soon at two of the department's prisons and will eventually be available for 9,800 inmates.

Our whole goal is to change the philosophy to reduce recidivism by giving inmates a chance to improve in prison, he said.

Elsner's lecture tonight, which is free to all, is at the First Unitarian Church at 514 N. Charles Street in Baltimore, beginning at 6.30 p.m.