  Yes, this prison scandal just gets worse and worse. The steady stream of images and videos seems to have slowed, only to be replaced by a similar stream of leaked memos and communiques.
The only question left is: which are more damning? About the conditions: The [inmates] work seven days a week, are fed only twice a day, get no coffee, no cigarettes, no salt, pepper or ketchup and no organized recreation. ... They have to pay $10 every time they need to see a nurse. If they want to write to their families, they have to use special postcards with the sheriff's picture on them.
If their loved ones visit, they see them through thick plate glass or over a video link. Most inmates are serving sentences of a year or less for relatively minor convictions or are awaiting trial ... They wear pink underwear and black and white striped uniforms. Around 2,000 inmates live in tents under the blazing ... sun in temperatures which last summer often exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit ... "I got meal costs down to 40 cents a day per inmate. It costs $1.15 a day to feed the department's dogs. Now, I'm cutting prisoners' calories from 3,000 to 2,500 a day," the sheriff said during a recent tour.
Next morning at 6 a.m., 15 [prisoners] assembled for chain gang duty. They were padlocked together by the ankle, five to each chain, and marched military style out to a van that transported them to their work site -- a county cemetery half an hour out of the city in the desert. Yes, that is fundamentally disturbing. Of course, what makes it even more disturbing is that fact that urlLink the article is from October, 2003. And that it is talking about a prison not in Iraq, but in Arizona. That's right, this was all happening in the United States . So much damage has already been done. A significant number of Iraqis--54%, according to urlLink a recent poll --believe that all Americans are fundamentally similar to the soldiers who committed the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Now, it is up to Americans to prove to Iraqis and to the world that those who could commit abuses such as those in Arizona or Iraq, and those who could order such abuses committed, are not the majority of the population, but rather a freakish one percent who will be dealt with harshly--and humanely. urlLink Read more! 
