“As the prisoners stand motionless next to each other and cover themselves with plastic bags to protect themselves from chemical weapons, the riot squad bursts in, spraying torrents of Mace and freely swinging their batons. The inmates offer no resistance. They later sport black eyes and broken jaws. One disappears for months after being dragged by his shackles down the stairs and across the floor, bleeding and screaming” (American Friends Service Committee, 2011, p. 7).

 

In recent years, U.S. prison inmates have been beaten with fists and batons, stomped on, kicked, shot, stunned with electronic devices, doused with chemical sprays, choked, and slammed face first onto concrete floors by the officers whose job it is to guard them. Inmates have ended up with broken jaws, smashed ribs, perforated eardrums, missing teeth, burn scars—not to mention psychological scars and emotional pain. Some have died” (Human Rights Watch, 2004).

 

In prisons in the United States, there is an abhorrent amount of abuse present. Prisoners are left with no ways to defend or object to any sort of cruel treatment, any objections have been known to result in further punishment, solitary confinement, and abuse. Within Haryana jails methods of abuse include: slapping, verbal abuse, electric shocks, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, infliction of pain to sexual organs (Sharma, 2019). This is an example of only one prison; accounts of harsher treatment have been reported in numerous cases as well. Attempts to reach out and share this deprivation of basic human rights have been known to be met with sharp resistance and further punishment. Prisoners are forcibly isolated from the world and left to the frustrations of their captors.

 

 

 

 

References

American Friends Service Committee. (2011). B. Kerness & B. Breslaw (Eds.), Torture in United States Prisons: Evidence of human rights violations 2nd edition. Retrieved from https://www.afsc.org/sites/default/files/documents/torture_in_us_prisons.pdf.

Human Rights Watch. (2004). Prisoner abuse: How different are U.S. prisons? Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/05/13/prisoner-abuse-how-different-are-us-prisons#.