Posted on: Tuesday, June 1, 2004

ISLAND VOICES
Bush has history with prisons

Robert Perkinson teaches international relations and U.S. criminal justice policy at the University of Hawai'i. He is writing a book on Texas prisons.

Addressing the Army War College on May 24, President Bush announced that the notorious Abu Ghraib prison will soon be demolished and "a humane, well-supervised prison system" will take its place as a symbol of Iraqi democracy and American beneficence. Like many of the administration's grand pronouncements, this is a noble promise but one Mr. Bush is exceptionally unqualified to keep.

There is no doubt the president has prison management experience. In 1995, during his first year as Texas governor, he opened new prisons at the rate of one per week. Over the course of his tenure, Texas' prison population grew by 48,000. No mere custodian, Gov. Bush left his mark on Texas justice by extending sentences for non-violent offenders, converting drug treatment centers to regular prisons, sending children to adult facilities, vetoing a bill to create a public defender system (Texas is one of the few states without one), and most famously by expediting executions, which rose to 152 under his watch, a modern American record.

The result was a punishment colossus that virtually no one regarded as "humane" or "well-supervised." Indeed, after Gov. Bush had been on the job for five years, a federal judge, William Justice, ruled that Texas' entire penal system was pervaded by a "culture of sadistic and malicious violence." Presiding over a lengthy prisoner rights case, Justice concluded that Texas prison guards routinely rely on excessive force, officials turn a blind eye to sexual enslavement, and the state's supermaximum-security units function as "virtual incubators of psychoses."

As president, Bush has also distinguished himself as an avid jailer. Under his stewardship, the federal Bureau of Prisons for the first time surpassed California and Texas' carceral bureaucracies to become the largest in the nation — as well as one of the most overcrowded, privately subcontracted and retributive.

A Bush administration crackdown on immigrants after 9/11 has also resulted in greater turmoil at INS facilities. At a federal detention complex in Brooklyn, Justice Department investigators turned up some 300 videotapes that played like movie trailers for the Abu Ghraib fiasco. According to a December 2003 Inspector General's report, the tapes show how "officers slammed and bounced detainees against the wall" and subjected inmates to punitive and gratuitous strip searches.

One former detainee, who later pleaded guilty to nothing more than credit card fraud, charged in federal court that he was repeatedly punched and kicked, paraded naked in front of female guards, cursed as a "Muslim bastard" and sodomized with a flashlight.

Even more distressing than these home-front abuses is Bush's impact as warden to the world. After Sept. 11, the president supervised the creation of a global network of secret detention facilities that operate entirely outside international and even U.S. law. Meanwhile, top Pentagon officials authorized unorthodox interrogation techniques, including attack-dog intimidation, naked questioning, hooding, prolonged shackling, sleep deprivation and extreme temperature fluctuations — techniques that military brass now admit violated the Geneva Conventions.

As a mountain of evidence now suggests, the consequence of these White House and Pentagon initiatives was not only degenerate photo shoots at Abu Ghraib but widespread torture and possibly even murder in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Military authorities have now reopened investigations into 37 suspicious deaths that took place in military custody since 2001.

In short, President Bush's extensive record in prison management reads more like the resume of a war criminal than a humanitarian reformer.