![]() ![]() Immigrant workers are being hunted down and arrested in their homes and at their work places. Some 77,000 people were detained in February for seeking to cross the southern border. Under the Trump administration, extending the policies developed by Obama, the federal government is waging a war on immigrants, holding thousands of men, women and children in degrading conditions. A mother in Indiana was detained for three days in February in a squalid jail alongside convicts because of an unpaid ambulance bill, which she had never received in the mail. While debtors’ prisons are officially outlawed, poor workers are routinely held for their debts. Confinement to these living coffins is known to drive prisoners to suicide. At least 4,000 of those held in complete isolation from the outside world suffer from severe mental illness. Researchers estimate that 61,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement on any given day, a form of incarceration that the UN has declared to be tantamount to torture. Another half a million, one in five inmates, are serving long prison sentences for nonviolent drug convictions. Many are kept in detention simply because they are too poor pay to pay the median bail of $10,000. More than 540,000 of those held in jail on any given day have not been convicted of any crime. ![]() For every 100,000 residents, there are 698 people in detention. The US accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s incarcerated population. Including those on probation or parole, nearly seven million Americans are caught up in what is absurdly called the “criminal justice system.” More than 2.3 million people are packed like cattle into America’s overflowing system of state and federal prisons, local jails and immigration detention camps. They are repeated in different forms in the prisons of every state, county and city across the United States. While particularly horrific, such conditions are by no means unique. More than 2,000 photos of abuse in one Alabama prison given to the media by the Southern Poverty Law Center in advance of the report’s release depict the gruesome reality of the conditions detailed in hundreds of interviews with prisoners and their families conducted by federal investigators over more than two years. They constitute a gross violation of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. These are the nightmare conditions in the Alabama state-run prison system, described in a Justice Department report released this week. Nor is it about the abuse of detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or a CIA black site. This is not the description of a torture chamber in el-Sisi’s Egypt or Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. Fifteen suicides have been recorded in the last 15 months. Pleas for help, scrawled in blood, stain the walls from prisoners held in solitary confinement. Copy link A decentered black square over a white square.Rapes, murders, beatings, stabbings, mutilations and arson are rampant. WhatsApp Messenger An icon of the Whatsapp messenger app logo. Facebook Messenger An icon of the Twitter app logo. Facebook Messenger An icon of the facebook messenger app logo. Loading Spinner An icon of a loading spinner. Success Tick Timeout An icon of a greyed out success tick. Information An icon of an information logo. Speech Bubble Icon A icon displaying a speech bubble WhatsApp An icon of the WhatsApp logo. Video Camera An icon of a video camera shape. Previous An icon of an arrow pointing to the left. Notice An explanation mark centred inside a circle. Next An icon of an arrow pointing to the right. ![]() Hamburger Menu Icon An icon used to represent a collapsed menu. Search Icon A magnifying glass icon that is used to represent the function of searching. Magnifying Glass An icon of a magnifying glass. Comments An icon of a speech bubble, denoting user comments. Close Icon An icon used to represent where to interact to collapse or dismiss a component Comment An icon of a speech bubble. Breaking An icon of an exclamation mark on a circular background. ![]()
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