The Republican frontrunner for president could go to prison during the 2024 campaign. If the G.O.P.-led House Oversight Committee is right that Joe Biden took millions in bribes, so could the Democratic frontrunner. The debates could get…interesting.
Prisoners are the ultimate wards of the state, which exerts complete control over every facet of their lives. Among the government’s responsibilities to their most vulnerable charges are its duties to provide inmates with adequate nutrition, housing, security and medical care, the latter of which has been codified by two landmark Supreme Court rulings. In the first of these decisions, Estelle v. Gamble (1972), the Court held that prison authorities who deliberately refuse to address the medical needs of an prisoner constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution and that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the ‘unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain’…proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.”
The death of Lashawn Thompson fits this description to a T.
While awaiting trial on a misdemeanor case of battery last summer, Thompson, 35, was remanded to Fulton County jail in Atlanta, in the psychiatric wing, because he was behaving erratically. “Three months later Mr. Thompson was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs,” according to family attorney Michael Harper, who posted nauseating photos of Thompson’s squalid cell on Facebook. “Jail records obtained via Georgia’s Open Records Requests establish that the detention officers and medical staff at the jail noticed that Mr. Thompson was deteriorating, but did nothing to administer aid to him or to help him.”
Thompson’s face and torso are seen covered in bugs.
Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who specializes in bed bugs said he’d never seen anything “quite to this level” but confirmed that prolonged exposure to a large number of bed bugs can cause fatal anemia if untreated. “Bed bugs feed on blood and very large numbers of bed bugs feed on very large amounts of blood,” Potter said.
“It’s no secret that the dilapidated and rapidly eroding conditions of the current facility make it incredibly difficult to meet the goal of providing a clean, well-maintained and healthy environment for all inmates and staff,” the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, said in a statement. Appalling conditions have been an ongoing, unaddressed problem for years—and not just in Atlanta.
Joshua Lemore, a 29-year-old Indiana man who struggled with schizophrenia, was arrested for pulling a nurse’s hair at the hospital where he’d been taken for a wellness check in 2021. He was locked in solitary confinement— a barbaric practice mostly banned in Europe—without human contact or medical care. He didn’t eat, no one checked on him and he starved to death 20 days later. The total lack of psychological help for a detainee in mental-health crisis wasn’t unusual: “The [Jackson County] jail was cited in 2019, 2020 and June 2021 by the Indiana Department of Corrections for being out of compliance with a state law requiring it to arrange for 24-hour emergency psychological care,” according to USA Today.
Also in 2021, Larry Price Jr. joined the long list of mentally-ill prisoners arrested for minor offenses who die of neglect and abuse in American jails and prisons. A homeless schizophrenic, the 51-year-old Arkansas man had entered a police station where he rambled threats against cops and made his hand into the shape of a gun: “terroristic threatening in the first degree,” according to the district attorney. Price “was found by guards lying in a pool of his own urine and contaminated water, unresponsive in August 2021 after having been detained for more than a year,” ABC News reported, “his once 6-foot-2-inch, 185-pound frame emaciated down to 121 pounds, according to the Arkansas State Crime Lab.” The Lab determined he had died of hunger and thirst.
The Bill of Rights and a pair of Supreme Court rulings are supposed to prevent these outrages—but those aren’t enough. Of the tens of thousands of Americans who perish behind bars each year, many alleged having been denied medical care or adequate food. Prisons that outsource inmate healthcare to for-profit outside contractors have even higher death rates.
Each year of incarceration takes two years off average life expectancy.
If government refuses or cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of people accused or convicted of a crime, which obviously includes access to healthcare and sanitary conditions, it should not be in the imprisonment business. We need a federal law that allows a prisoner suffering inhumane conditions, and their family members and lawyers, with a right to file an emergency ex parte petition for immediate release.
If the conditions are determined to be systemic and facility-wide, the entire operation should be shut down at once. That’s the case where I live in New York, at the city jail on Riker’s Island. After “years of mismanagement and neglect”—the Department of Corrections’ own spokesman’s words—a 2021 New York Post exposé found “as many as 26 men stuffed body to body in single cells where they were forced to relieve themselves inside plastic bags and take turns sleeping on the fetid floors.” Despite an annual $1.2 billion budget, “Dozens of men crammed together for days in temporary holding cells amid a pandemic. Filthy floors sullied with rotten food, maggots, urine, feces and blood. Plastic sheets for blankets, cardboard boxes for beds and bags that substituted for toilets.” Nothing has improved since.
Lest you worry that American streets would suddenly be filled with released murderers and rapists, chill. One out of four prisoners is there for the terrifying crime of violating parole. Another one out of five is awaiting trial or serving time for a misdemeanor or civil infraction.
As for the rest? We’re not poor. Assuming we still want to incarcerate more of our citizens than any other country but China, cities, states and the federal government will find the money to create a prison-industrial complex that doesn’t feed American citizens to swarms of biting insects.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Diversity is the word of the day everywhere you look, particularly in employment and in the media. But they only mean certain types of diversity. Anything related to class or politics doesn’t count.
Obama Doesn’t Need Congress. He Needs Travelocity.
Guantánamo is complicated. Everyone says so.
Everyone is wrong.
There’s nothing complicated about it. Guantánamo should be closed.
Mainstream media pundits don’t get it. They suggest a lame hodgepodge of solutions: a few repatriations here, a few extraordinary renditions there, maybe convincing some allies to take the victims of our stupid “war on terrorism.”
Immoral and idiotic.
All of the detainees — every last one of them, the schlubs who have been officially cleared by the Pentagon and, yes, even the scary dudes the government insists are “the worst of the worst” — can, should and — if the United States Constitution means anything at all — must be released.
Here.
In the United States.
I don’t find myself saying this very often, but President Obama is finally doing talking about doing something right. Granted, he let five years pass before he took the problem seriously. It took a hunger strike, now entering its fourth month, which could begin claiming the lives of some of the more than 100 participating POWs, to get his attention. Even now, he is violating the detainees’ human rights and the standards of the American Medical Association by violently shoving feeding tubes up their noses to —irony alert! — save their lives. Still, better late than never: Obama (finally) says he wants to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise by closing this monstrosity.
“Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” he told a news conference. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us, in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”
So close it. You don’t need Congress. All you need is a Travelocity account.
When Obama became president in 2009, there were 245 prisoners at Gitmo. Now there are 166. (None have been released since 2011, which demoralized the remaining prisoners to the point that many are willing to die from hunger.) Some of these wretches been there since the concentration camp — look it up, there is no better term for it — opened 12 years ago.
It’s been ages. Three inmates arrived at Gitmo as children. As they passed through adolescence and entered adulthood, they were tortured, abused, and denied basic human rights by American soldiers and CIA agents, left to rot in American dog cages. (At least 28 children have done time there.)
American officials worry that their experience may have radicalized them. How could it not? If it hasn’t, they must be insane.
The horrors are just beginning to come out. A Spanish investigation censored in U.S. media found that American soldiers have abused Gitmo prisoners with “blows to [the] testicles,” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep,” being “inoculated…through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts,'” smearing feces on prisoners and (of course) waterboarding.
Actionable intelligence obtained under torture: none.
This was in 2009. Under Obama.
Few Americans are aware of how the vast majority of the so-called detainees got there. Mostly, they were sold. Yes, like slaves: Afghan warlords and Pakistani tribesmen sold anyone they could find, especially Arabs and other foreigners fleeing the 2001 US invasion, to the CIA and the US military for bounties ranging between $3,000 and $25,000. Hundreds of men and boys shipped to America’s new gulag were innocent, simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. As for the rest, the majority were never a threat to America. Their jihad was against the governments of U.S. frenemies like China, Pakistan and Yemen.
The 166 survivors — several have committed suicide, and some deaths classified as suicides were almost certainly murdered under torture using an obscure technique called “dryboarding” — can be classified into four categories:
Eighty-six have been cleared for transfer or release but can’t be sent back to their home country — Yemen, for most of them — because, as political dissidents, they might be — irony alert! — tortured or killed.
The Obama administration considers 47 too dangerous to release, but cannot prosecute them because there isn’t enough evidence against them, or the case against them has been compromised by the fact that they were tortured.
Twenty-four are deemed prosecutable but no one can say when a trial might take place.
Six have been charged and three have been convicted in the kangaroo court “military commission” system invented by George W. Bush’s legal team to prosecute “unlawful combatants,” a phony term that doesn’t exist under U.S. or international law.
Obama should stop blaming Congress. Yes, the Republicans did refuse to allocate funds to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the United States. But Obama signed their legislation into law. He owns this mess.
All 166 men should be offered the choice of a ticket back home or permanent residency in the United States. After all, what are we talking about? 166 one-way tickets. Even if we fly these guys first-class, $250,000 isn’t going to break the bank. Obama is worth about $12 million. Who needs taxpayer money? He could cover that personally.
Consider it retroactive payment for that 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Under the American system of justice, everyone — citizen or noncitizen — is innocent until proven guilty. 163 of these guys clearly can’t be proven guilty, and the three that were found guilty obviously didn’t get a fair trial. The rules might have been different had the Bush and Obama administrations classified them as POWs, but he didn’t want to give them the rights that they were entitled to under the Geneva Conventions. The US has been having it both ways for 12 long years. This disgusting farce needs to come to an end now.
Imagine the visual: Obama flies to Cuba, personally apologizes to each man, hands him a big check for $10 million, throws open the gates of the camp and gives it back to Cuba (from which we stole it in the first place). Hell, let them hitch a ride back to Andrews on Air Force One. Open bar!
Would some of these ex-Gitmo victims join the fight against the United States? Maybe. After all, 60% of American ex-cons reoffend. In a free society, that’s a risk that we take.
Still, you’ve got to think that in a country full of security cameras, with two or three overfunded intelligence agencies and countless domestic police apparatuses, it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the former prisoners of Guantánamo with job training, phone taps, GPS trackers on their cars and two or three agents each to follow them around and make sure that they don’t get into trouble.
And don’t forget that footage of Obama apologizing.
Can you imagine how pissed off the Al Qaeda guys would be?
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Obama signs an executive order expanding the right of the government to hold prisoners without charging them and keeping Guantanamo concentration camp open.
Republicans argue that the Gitmo detainees cannot be safely transferred to the U.S. Why not?
Why not just close Gitmo now and let the detainees go? “Too complicated,” say Obama and Obama’s torturers (they’re his torturers now!).
This one resulted from a few conversations I’ve had lately with conservative friends. There are other differences between lefties and righties, of course, but one of those we’ve neglected is this one. Many Republicans wonder, given all the things America does right, why we whine so much about what it does wrong. We, of course, wonder why conservatives don’t want to make our country even better.
