Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Torture In New York Prisons

Last week, the New York Times reported allegations that prison guards systematically tortured inmates at Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York following the high profile escape of two inmates.

More than 60 prisoners filed complaints claiming that they suffered abuse, including beatings, stranglings and death threats. Most significant, however, was the apparent personal involvement of New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in these brutal actions.


Just hours before state prison guards without name tags descended upon the cell block to torture the escapees’ fellow prisoners, Cuomo had visited the prison, asking one inmate, in the presence of the media, why he did not hear the escapees cutting through their prison bars. “[It] must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” before giving him “his best tough-guy stare,” according to the prisoner, and walking off.


Cuomo later told ABC News, “I chatted with a couple of the inmates myself and I said, you must be a very heavy sleeper. They were heard. They had to be heard.”


Within a matter of hours, the inmate Cuomo spoke to was asked by an unnamed guard, “You know what waterboarding is?” before having his head thrust into a plastic bag hanging from a pipe and being beaten for 20 minutes. Another inmate reported being hung by a plastic bag used as a noose until he passed out.


Despite these shocking revelations, not a single national news outlet has commented on the incident since Wednesday or even bothered to follow up on the story. This includes the supposed “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, whose breaking of the story amounted to a controlled, semi-official release of information.


You can read the rest @

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/18/pers-a18.html

Is the MSM cowardly, or are they merely reporting only what their corporate masters want them to?


There also is evidence of the assassination of political prisoners in US prisons. You can read about it here:


http://www.globalresearch.ca/hugo-pinell-assassinated-in-california-prison-yard/5469728


We are not just on a slippery slope, we're well down toward the bottom.


We have lost our souls.


Update: And, of course, prisoners also are beaten to death by their guards:


On the evening of April 21 in Building 21 at the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Samuel Harrell, an inmate with a history of erratic behavior linked to bipolar disorder, packed his bags and announced he was going home, though he still had several years left to serve on his drug sentence.


Not long after, he got into a confrontation with corrections officers, was thrown to the floor and was handcuffed. As many as 20 officers — including members of a group known around the prison as the Beat Up Squad — repeatedly kicked and punched Mr. Harrell, who is black, with some of them shouting racial slurs, according to more than a dozen inmate witnesses. “Like he was a trampoline, they were jumping on him,” said Edwin Pearson, an inmate who watched from a nearby bathroom.


Mr. Harrell was then thrown or dragged down a staircase, according to the inmates’ accounts. One inmate reported seeing him lying on the landing, “bent in an impossible position.”

You can read the rest @

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/nyregion/fishkill-prison-inmate-died-after-fight-with-officers-records-show.html

We live in a great country, folks.

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