APA Referendum & the Prisons Issue: Vignettes from Hell

There was a bit of a scare for American Psychological Association supporters of the anti-torture referendum when some APA members who were withholding their dues in protest of APA interrogation policy felt they weren't getting their ballots in the mail. The mailing includes the APA ballot for president of the organization, as well as the ballot for the referendum. It turns out that the mailings may have been only somewhat delayed, and APA is cooperating to help members get their ballots.

In good news for referendum supporters, APA divisions 9 and 27, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and the Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community Psychology, respectively, have voted to endorse the referendum. Meanwhile, the debate over the pros and cons of the referendum, which seeks to ban psychologist participation "in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights," continues apace.

The initiators of the referendum are trying to address their opponents criticism, and have posted an updated FAQ page towards that end.

Abuse in American Prisons

Some of the opponents of the APA referendum say, disingenuously in my opinion, that passage of the referendum could jeopardize psychologist jobs in U.S. supermax prisons or other forensic settings. The leftwing version of this criticism is to oppose the resolution because it does not go far enough, i.e., that it fails to address both torture and abusive, inhumane conditions that occur in U.S. prisons.

It is indisputable that terrible abuse takes place in prisons in the United States, and that conditions and treatment in some amount to torture. This scandal has gone on for years, and the APA has totally failed to address it. However, to take anti-torture activists to task because their referendum (or earlier resolutions backed by the same group of supporters) addresses Pentagon/CIA torture and not abuse in American prisons, misses the point entirely, giving "progressive" cover to a political bloc with the supporters of military interrogator jobs in sites that disallow basic human rights.

The backers of the referendum address this issue in an August 6 letter to APA members:

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

I would have liked to see a stronger statement about the need to address the "harms and legal struggles" faced by domestic U.S. prisoners, but I also understand that the target the referendum is aiming at is the illegal military/CIA sites where prisoners have no constitutional or rights protection, and where torture is conducted as a matter of policy.

Still, both the medical and psychological establishments will have to face sooner or later the obscene mess that is U.S. penal practice. I can't understand, for my own part, why psychologists or any health professional would want to work in any place that propagates human suffering. For those who enter such institutions believing they can "make a difference" in treatment, or ameliorate suffering, they are usually cruelly disillusioned within a short period of time. (I have spoken to some of these psychologists, and they are have made it clear to me that the system is unsympathetic and unmoveable.) The others, like thousands of other prison employees, find ways to rationalize their collaboration with an unjust and barbaric system.

The conditions in U.S. prisons are bad and getting worse. A Human Rights Watch article noted:

A federal judge in 1999 concluded that Texas prisons were pervaded by a “culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” In 1995, a federal judge found a stunning pattern of staff assaults, abusive use of electronic stun devices guns, beatings, and brutality at Pelican Bay Prison in California, and concluded the violence “appears to be open, acknowledged, tolerated and sometimes expressly approved” by high ranking corrections officials....

In January 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice reported on terrible conditions at Arizona’s juvenile detentions centers, including sexual abuse of the children by staff members (and fellow inmates) that occurs “with disturbing frequency” and a level of physical abuse that is ”equally disturbing.”

Murder by Medical Neglect: the case of Hiu Lui Ng

The New York Times has an article by Nina Bernstein yesterday on the death in immigration custody of Hiu Lui Ng, a computer engineer in the U.S. since 1992, placed in detention a year ago even as he was applying for his green card. Denied treatment for months, it took a federal judge's order to get an MRI for Mr. Ng. The results came too late for any effective treatment.

In April [2008], Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months....

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

The article chronicles the nightmarish treatment of Mr. Ng, as officials seems to have lied about his treatment, and shifted him from prison to prison to avoid his habeas petition, filed so he could seek medical treatment. The Times article documents other recent cases of negligence leading to fatalities for immmigrant prisoners in its system.

Release Torture Victim Pol Brennan!

A case that does link U.S. prisons with the larger torture issue concerns the continued incarceration of former Irish Republican Army member Pol Brennan. He was arrested over 30 years ago for carrying explosives, and imprisoned in the notorious "H-blocks" of Long Kesh Prison in Britain (razed in 2006), where prisoners were subjected to torture via the "five techniques". These techniques would seem familiar to us today, who have seen the revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. They include hooding, wall-standing (stress positions), sensory overload via noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and drink.

Pol Brennan escaped from Long Kesh as part of a big prison break of 38 prisoners in 1983.

Sandy Boyer and Shaun Harkin described Mr. Brennan's situation in an article at Counterpunch last May.

Pol made his way to the [San Francisco] Bay Area, where he met and married Joanna Volz, a U.S. citizen. They lived quietly until January 1993, when federal agents arrested Brennan on a British extradition warrant. He was forced to spend more than seven years fighting extradition, and was imprisoned for three of those years, half the time in a building with no windows.

The situation in Northern Ireland changed dramatically in ensuing years, with a political agreement between the Provisional IRA and the British government. Britain withdrew its request for Brennan's extradition in 2000. The U.S. also suspended deportation proceedings against some former IRA prisoners. But Brennan still faced deportation, though it was put on hold as his application for political asylum was being considered.

Brennan settled into domestic life, working as a carpenter. As adjudication for political asylum often does (to the stress of those applying, and the scandal of social justice in the U.S.), his asylum case went on for years, while his work permits were routinely approved.

But the new gung-ho security forces born in the fires of 9/11 have generated a new atmosphere. On January 26, 2008, Brennan and his wife were stopped at an immigration checkpoint in Texas. Because his work authorization was expired, and despite the fact that he could produce evidence of his asylum case and pending work permit application, the Border Patrol locked him up:

Brennan says, "They acted as if they had caught the terrorist al-Zarqawi, as they as they huddled around their computer screens. Their little eyes were jiggling in their heads with excitement"....

Brennan was soon moved to solitary confinement, because, apparently, he was considered an escape risk since he broke out of Long Kesh 25 years earlier. It was as if they expected the IRA to invade South Texas to free him.

Today, Pol is locked in a cell 23 hours a day....

An immigration judge denied Brennan bail, saying he is a "flight risk" and "a danger to the community."

According to an ACLU attorney, Mr. Brennan is currently being held at "Willacy County Detention Center, also known as 'Tent City' or 'Ritmo,' and the South Texas Detention Complex. Willacy is run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based private prison company that gained some notoriety when its former director was tapped to set up the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq." (Emphasis added) Willacy is so bad that its own guards went to the media to complain of rotten maggot-infested food being fed to its 2000 or so immigrant prisoners.

Pol Brennan is another in a by now long stream of victims of abitrary detention and inhumane treatment by the U.S. government and its seamy security contractors. Those who wish to support Mr. Brennan in his campaign for release should visit his support website.

Support the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008

An action alert from Physicians for Human Rights:

We urge you to write your Senators and Representative today to support the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008.

Shocking exposés this week by the New York Times, Washington Post, and 60 Minutes have confirmed the alarming breakdown in health care for detained asylum seekers and other immigrants in custody of the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in needless suffering and, in the most tragic cases, avoidable death.

The Detainee Basic Medical Care Act would help to prevent these tragedies by requiring the government to protect the rights and well-being of asylum seekers and others held in immigration prisons throughout the United States.

Please take action now in support of humane treatment and the right to health care of asylum seekers and other immigration detainees....

If you know of currently or previously detained asylum seekers who received inadequate health care in detention, please let us know as soon as you can by emailing Jennie Baldé at jbalde@phrusa.org.

Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein are reporting the story at the Washington Post:

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Federal officials who oversee immigration detention said last week that they are "committed to ensuring the safety and well-being" of everyone in their custody.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse.

I once had an asylum detainee as a psychotherapy patient. I can tell you he suffered tremendously from poor health care at the center where he was held: poor access to doctors or medications; misdiagnosis; jailors who saw most ill detainees as complainers at best, or malingerers at worst -- and this patient was lucky, as he did not have a life-threatening illness. Something must be done!

Support PHR's campaign and take action now.

U.S. -- The Prison-House of Nations

My blog entry on this is a few days late, but what does it matter for the 2.3 million Americans who languish in the prisons and jails of this country? They have plenty of time on their hands.

The Washington Post article last Thursday, New High In U.S. Prison Numbers, grabbed some headlines and commentary in the following days. But soon, all too soon, the revelations will grow stale, the stuff of old news, and the millions of prisoners placed safely not only behind bars, but out of sight and mind, can return to their quotidian lives of ongoing despair and impotent frustration. The Pew Report that generated the recent headlines is available here.

N.C. Aizenman writes at the WP:

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

How can such figures mesh with any view of the U.S. as a country of free men and women? You don't have to be a penal expert to know that besides having a racist justice system, the rise in incarceration is due to obscene drug laws, mandatory minimum sentencing, the draconian three-strikes-and-you're-out laws passed by demagogic politicians and a frightened populace, and petty, tyrannical probation enforcement. As a result, there are more than one million non-violent offenders locked away in the U.S. prison system. Jailing people is a big industry in the U.S., and like any capitalist enterprise, the prison-industrial complex is always seeking new markets and greater expansion.

One fast growing area of prison expansion concerns the INS jailing of immigrants to the U.S. Some of these are asylum seekers, fleeing persecution in their native lands, and held in indefinite detention at public, and increasingly, at private prisons throughout the country. An estimated 1.6 million immigrants are detained at some point in their immigration hearings. From a report by CorpWatch:

As the government invokes national security to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants, the private-prison industry is booming. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on New York, immigrants have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the U.S. today. In fiscal year 2005, more than 350,000 immigrants went through the courts. "A growing share of them committed no crimes while in the United States - 53 percent this year, up from 37 percent in 2001 - even though Bush administration officials repeatedly have said their priority is deporting criminals," the Denver Post reported....

The government claims that locking up people without legal status is the only way to ensure that they do not disappear into the country. A December 2004 DHS report from the Office of the Inspector General concluded that all the evidence proved the “importance of detention in relation to the eventual removal of an alien. Hence effective management of detention bed space can substantially contribute to immigration enforcement efforts.”

The speed and scope of the Bush administration round up and jailing of non-citizens created a dramatically increased need for immigrant detention space. And saved the flailing corrections industry.

One example of this new privatization of prisons is the new prison built by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), "one of the nation's biggest prison companies", in Florence, Arizona:

The complex in Florence is part of a 300-facility-strong network of immigrant incarceration facilities. The average time an immigrant is detained is 42.5 days from arrest to deportation. At $85 a day per detainee, that adds up to $3,612.50 per person. In 2003, DHS was holding 231,500 detainees, and the budget to cover this was $1.3 billion. Since 2001, the DHS budget for detention bed space has increased each fiscal year as has the number of beds. In 2003 there was more than $50 million slated for the construction of immigrant jails....

For the second quarter of 2005, CCA announced that its revenue had increased three percent over last year, for a total of almost $300 million. CCA calculates that it expenditure of $28.89 per inmate, per day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate....

Business is good for CCA and the more people it stuffs into its prisons the better it becomes. "As you know, the first 100 inmates into a facility, we lose money, and the last 100 inmates into a facility we make a lot of money." CCA Chief Financial Officer Irving Lingo said on a 2006 company conference call.

This trafficking in prisoners demonstrates how deep the moral rot has penetrated this society. The U.S. as a society has truly lost its soul. The leaders of this country seem to be bound and determined to realize concretely the prophecy of Rousseau made in the years before both the French and American Revolutions:

Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.

U.S. Forcibly Drugs Immigrants -- ACLU Suit

From the ACLU press release on May 8:

Two Men Given Powerful Drugs Against Their Will

LOS ANGELES - The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has learned that two immigrants were forcibly sedated by the United States government. Raymond Soeoth and Amadou Diouf, clients in an ACLU of Southern California lawsuit, revealed that they had both been drugged involuntarily during attempts to deport them.

Diouf was under court protection from deportation when officers put him on an airplane for return to his native Senegal. When he attempted to protest to the flight captain, he was sedated against his will.

While undergoing deportation Soeoth, a Christian minister from Indonesia, was drugged by guards even after he explained he did not want to be sedated.

In the end, neither man was deported. Both men were released last February after approximately two years in a federal facility in San Pedro as part of a lawsuit in which the ACLU of Southern California has won the release of more than a dozen people held indefinitely in violation of federal rules.

“These druggings were medically unnecessary, immoral, and dangerous,” said ACLU of Southern California Staff Attorney Ahilan Arulanantham, who represents Diouf and Soeoth. “Officers sedated these perfectly sane men, apparently just to silence them. The routine nature of these actions raises serious questions about how common this practice is.”

An article published today in the Los Angeles Daily Journal documents the men’s experiences. The reporter learned about the drugging during interviews with Diouf and Soeoth.

Medical experts consulted by the ACLU of Southern California say the drugs used on Soeoth, Haldol and Cogentin, are used to treat psychosis and should not have been prescribed for someone with no history of mental illness. A federal policy prohibits medication of detainees “solely to facilitate transport, unless a medical professional determines that they present a danger to themselves or to others.” [emphasis added]

The ACLU said that is a loose medical standard that is open to abuse.

“It is frightening that the government is using anti-psychotic drugs on immigrants who have no history of mental illness,” Arulanantham said.

The ACLU of Southern California is aggressively investigating the practice with the pro-bono assistance of the law firm Munger, Tolles, and Olson LLP.

I want to know what medical professional determined these men were a danger to self and others, allowing government agents (who are unspecified, but presumably Homeland Security) to use powerful psychotropic drugs to unwilling victims. Haldol, in particular, can cause permanent nerve damange and a chronic tic-like condition called tardive dyskinesia, sometimes, though rarely, after one administration.

It is hard to keep registering one outrage after another, but this practice must be stopped. Hopefully, the ACLU suit will bring us more information on the policies and personnel involved in this heinous misuse of medical procedure.