Torture Within the American Prison System
This is not an Abu Ghraib style exposure story of torture within American state and federal prisons, so don’t look for the jolt of unexpected disclosure. There’s no doubt plenty of bad things going on, but those are a journalist’s job to uncover and I’m not a journalist.
On the other hand, one of my personal definitions of ‘torture’ is “giving a man nothing to do and then making sure he does it.” Or her. To a very large degree, we have institutionalized that disgraceful behavior within our state and federal prison systems. Fortunately, we have fifty entirely separate and distinct prison authorities in the fifty entirely separate and distinct states of our Union and that’s a cause for hope. Hopeful because we might see some experimentation.
There are some good things going on in various pilot programs, but they are in woefully short supply and without much public support. Yet prison systems in the way they are most often operated are wasteful of public resources (money), ineffective