Prison Conditions in the United States (2024)

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH PRISON PROJECT

PRISONS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In many jails, prisons, immigration detention centers and juvenile detention facilities, confined individuals suffered from physical mistreatment, excessive disciplinary sanctions, barely tolerable physical

Prison Conditions in the United States (1)

Auburn Prison, state of New York

conditions, and inadequate medical and mental health care. Unfortunately, there was little support from politicians or the public for reform.

Fifty-three percent of all state inmates were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, while criminal justice policies increased the length of prison sentences and diminished the availability of parole. The U.S. incarcerated a greater proportion of its population than any countries except Russia and Rwanda: more than 1.7 million people were either in prison or in jail in 1998, reflecting an incarceration rate of more than 645 per 100,000residents, double the rate of a decade before. Approximately one in every 117 adult males was in prison.

Surging prison populations and public reluctance to fund new construction produced dangerously overcrowded prisons. Violence continued to be pervasive: in 1997 (the most recent year for which data were available), sixty-nine inmates were killed by other inmates, and thousands were injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Extortion andintimidation were commonplace. Most inmates hadscant opportunities for work, training, education, treatment or counseling. Mentally ill inmatesestimated to constitute between 6 and 14 percent of the incarcerated populationrarely received adequate monitoring or treatment.

Many local jails were dirty, unsafe, vermin-infested, and lacked areas in which inmates could exercise or get fresh air. Some jail authorities placed inmates inrestraining devices for long periods far in excess oflegitimate safety considerations. Severe overcrowdingcoupled with inadequate staffing in many jails created dangerous conditions reflected in the numbers of inmates injured in fights, who experiencedseizures and other medical emergencies without properattention, and who managed to escape.

Authorities relied increasingly on administrative segregation in super-maximum security prisons to maintain control. Prisoners deemed particularly disruptiveor dangerous were isolated in small, oftenwindowless cells for twenty-three hours a day; more than 24,000 prisoners were kept in this modern formof solitary confinement at any given time.

At the end of 1997, Human Rights Watch released a reportdocumenting conditions in twosuper-maximum security prisons in the state of Indiana.Although excessive use of physical force in these facilities had diminished in recent years, we still found excessive isolation, controls, and restrictions thatwere not penologically justified, and mentally ill inmates whose conditions were exacerbated by theregime of isolation and restricted activities, as well asby the lack of appropriate mental health treatment. The Indiana Department of Corrections instituted a number of reforms that were responsive to our concerns. Most significant was the development of a special housing unit for the treatment of disruptiveor dangerous mentally ill inmates that opened in June 1998.

Abusive conduct by guards was reported in many prisons. The threat of such abuse was particularlyacute in supermax prisons. Since Corcoran State Prison inCalifornia opened in 1988, fifty inmates, most ofthem unarmed, were shot by prison guards and seven werekilled. In February 1998, federal authoritiesindicted eight Corcoran officers for deliberately pitting unarmed inmates against each other in gladiator-style fights which the guards would then break up by firing on them with rifles. In July, the stateannounced a new investigation into at least thirty-sixserious and fatal shootings of Corcoran inmates.

Guard abuse was by no means confined to California prisons. Across the country, inmates complained ofinstances of excessive and even clearly lawless use offorce. In Pennsylvania, dozens of guards from one facility, SCI Greene, were under investigation for beatings, slamming inmates into walls, racial taunting and other mistreatment of inmates. The state Department of Corrections fired four guards, and twenty-oneothers were demoted, suspended or reprimanded. In many other facilities across the country, however, abuses went unaddressed.

Overcrowded public prisons and the tight budgets of corrections agencies fueled the growth of privatecorrections companies: approximately 100,000 adults were confined in 142 privately operated prisons and jails nationwide. Many of these facilities operated with insufficient control and oversight from the publiccorrectional authorities. States failed to enact laws setting appropriate standards and regulatory mechanisms for private prisons, signed weak contracts,undertook insufficient monitoring and tolerated prolonged substandard conditions. In less than a year, there were two murders and thirteen stabbings at one privately operated prison in the state of Ohio.

Sexual and other abuses continued to be serious problems for women incarcerated in local jails, state andfederal prisons, and INS detention centers. Women in custody faced abuses at the hands of prison guards, most of whom are men, who subjected the women toverbal harassment, unwarranted visualsurveillance, abusive pat frisks and sexual assault.Fifteen states did not have criminal laws prohibitingcustodial sexual misconduct by guards, and Human RightsWatch found that in most states, guards were not properly trained about their duty to refrain from sexual abuse of prisoners. The problem of abuse was compounded by the continued rapid growth of the female inmate population. As a result women were warehoused in overcrowded prisons and were often unable to access basic services such as medical care and substance abuse treatment.

In Michigan, where women were plaintiffs in a civil rights suit jointly litigated by private lawyers and theDepartment of Justice, these women reported retaliatorybehavior by guards, as described in more detailbelow. The retaliation ranged from verbal abuse, intimidation, and excessive and abusive pat frisks, to loss of visitation privileges and "good time" accruedtoward early release.

Men in prison also suffered from prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, committed by fellow inmates. Prisonstaff often allowed or even tacitly encouraged sexual attacks by male prisoners. Despite the devastatingpsychological impact of such abuse, there were few if any preventative measures taken in most jurisdictions, while perpetrators were rarely punished adequately by prison officials.

As in previous years, increasing numbers of children were incarcerated nationwide, even as the number of violent juvenile offenders fell. Research by theDepartment of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice andDelinquency Prevention (OJJDP) found that only 6 percent ofjuvenile arrests in 1992 and 1994 were for violent crimes. Between 1994 and 1995, according to OJJDP, violent crime arrests of juveniles between the ages of fifteen and seventeen fell by 2 percent; arrests ofyounger juveniles for violent crimes dropped by 5 percent for the same period. Despite this decliningpercentage of violent juvenile offenders, and in spiteof the costs associated with incarceration, most statescontinued to incarcerate high numbers of childrenfor nonviolent offenses. Between 1992 and 1998, at leastforty states adopted legislation making it easier for children to be tried as adults, and forty-two states detained juveniles in adult jails while they awaited trial.

Prompted by a 1996 Human Rights Watch report on human rights abuses in the state of Georgia, theDepartment of Justice (DOJ) concluded a year-long investigation of the state's juvenile detention facilities in February 1998. The DOJ identified a "pattern of egregious conditions" that violated children's rights, including overcrowded and unsafe conditions,physical abuse by staff and excessive use ofdisciplinary measures, inadequate educational, medical andmental health services. In March 1998, thestate and the DOJ signed an agreement that required thestate to make extensive improvements. The DOJconcluded at least two other investigations of juvenilefacilities in 1998, finding violations in the countydetention centers in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Greenville,South Carolina. In each of these facilities, theDOJ found evidence that staff employed excessive forceagainst juvenile inmates.

Human Rights Watch reports on U.S. prisons:

Red Onion State Prison: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Virginia, April 1999
Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisem*nt Laws in the United States, October 1998
Locked Away: Immigration Detention in Jails in the United States, September 1998
Nowhere to Hide: Retaliation against Women in Michigan State Prisons, July 1998
Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana, October 1997
All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons, December 1996

From the California State Senate hearings on Corcoran State Prison:

Statement by Senator John Vasconcellos, October 22, 1998

The following online articles discuss recent developments with regard to prisons in the United States:

The following organizations work to ensure that U.S. prisoners are treated humanely and are confined in at leastminimally adequate conditions:

The ACLU National Prison Project, Washington, D.C.
California Coalition for Women Prisoners, San Francisco, California
Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Chicago, Illinois
Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, Washington, D.C.
Prison Law Office, San Quentin, California
Stop Prisoner Rape, Los Angeles, California

State and federal governmental prison sites:

Federal Bureau of Prisons/National Institute of Corrections
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,Prison Statistics
Links to state departments of corrections (from the "Corrections Connection")

Other useful sources of information on conditions, treatment, legal standards, and other issues relevant toU.S. prisons and jails:

Amnesty International, "Violations in Prisons and Jails" (chapter four of the report, United States of America: Rights for All, October 1998)
U.N. Human Rights Committee, Comments, April 6, 1995 (expressing concern about "conditions of detention ofpersons deprived of liberty in federal or state prisons").
American Correctional Association
American Jail Association
The Other Side of the Wall (prison law page)
PEN American Center, Prison Writing Program
Prison Legal News
Prisoners Self-Help Litigation Manual
Voices From Prison

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