WalMart Correctional
In his five-point plan for Iraq's reconstruction, President Bush said that after tearing down Abu Ghraib, he would build a "modern, maximum-security prison" as one way to wipe away the horrid stain of the prison scandal. But it is precisely these "supermax" prisons, as they are popularly known, that have come under fierce assault from prison reformers, lawmakers, and even some prison officials in the United States -- because of prisoner abuse scandals within their walls.
Supermax prisons have been the target of prisoner lawsuits in California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia and Illinois. Prisoners have called them "torture chambers" where they are subjected to flagrant human rights and civil liberties violations and appalling psychological and physical abuses. In a lawsuit filed by Ohio prisoners at the state's supermax prison in Youngstown in 2002, inmate Keith Garner bluntly told a judge that the conditions at the prison were "like being in a tomb."
Earl Ofari Hutchinson/Pacific News May.26.04
Of course he wants a brand new prison, no more nooks and crannies, no more places for the truth to leak out. The name of that game is total control. Old-style architecture has too many un-securables. The Panopticon needs to be built from the ground up, too many variables in adapting onto existing structures and institutions.
Don't we really need to face the risks of a looser social fabric?
Get those control freaks out of the command module.
Let Mom drive.
Not his mom, ours.
