US prison system, absolute scandal: Kevin Barrett

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, an editor of Veterans Today in Madison, to discuss a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which said prisoners with mental disabilities across the United States experience unnecessary, excessive, and even malicious force by prison staff.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Kevin Barrett, I do not know if you have seen this video or if you have read the details as revealed by Human Rights Watch. If you have seen the video, I am left really with no questions to ask you but what your reaction is to that video and then of course the report by HRW?

Barrett: Well, it is a little bit like the situation with the epidemic videos showing police abusing people here in the United States. I think this sort of thing has been going on for a long time and now there are more videos and we watch it and we are horrified but it is not something that it is just starting now.

This is endemic to the American system. You know, here in the United States we like to think of ourselves as being the world’s leading force for human rights and we even have political leaders who want to invade and occupy other countries and murder millions of people around the world, all supposedly in order to give those countries good human rights governments with democracy and so on, but we have some serious, serious problems here.

The American prison system is an absolute scandal. It is one of the worst in the world, which is ridiculous. We are the richest country in the world, why would we have the worst prison system?

I have noted before that it is a strange fact that when people are arrested and convicted for drug offenses that involve the US and Mexico and they have a choice of which country to serve their sentence in, they all want to serve their sentence in Mexico - a country that is not as rich as the United States but treats its prisoners far more humanely.

We have an epidemic of this kind of authoritarian brutality and cruelty in our policing, in our prison systems. United States locks up more people than anywhere in the world per capita and it has the nastiest, ugliest, most brutal and authoritarian prison system.

So while I am horrified by these images and by the facts reported by Human Rights Watch, I am not surprised.   

Press TV: We remember the torture report that came out in December and it took five years to compile and this was based on the CIA and the methods and techniques that they used which Dick Cheney came out and said – I am sorry to use the word- but he said it is all false, basically the way he viewed it.

But it was a long delivery report and there was some condemnation that came out from that.  But the scope of what is going on inside US prisons seems to be pretty much going on for such a long period of time that even attempts at reforms would take a while for any type of reform to happen. Is there any push from any particular sector in the US system, in the governmental system that is going to push for reforms or is that just the way it is inside US prisons?

Barrett: Well, yes, we have an interesting convergence of forces right now that could push for reforms in the policing and prison systems and that would be the African-Americans who are fed up with being mistreated by police and prisons.

Of course, the United States locks up African-Americans and other minorities at a widely disproportionate rate and so there is a new generation of activists that is coming along, that is ready to try to change this. And then we also have a libertarian wing of Ron Paul for example and even Rand Paul to a certain extent who is a leading candidate for president, have tried to win African-Americans support by targeting this problem and saying that we are locking up all sorts of people that should not be in prison in the first place and that our prisons are brutal.

So I think there is a chance that more and more attention will be paid to this issue. The problem though is that this is a corrupt and decadent society and to renew one thing you almost have to renew everything and I am not sure that things are going to get better before they get worse.

The United States economy is not in good shape, our moral standing in the world and our sense of who we are as a people has just been destroyed by the  9/11 neoconservative coup d'état and the trashing of the constitution and the rule of law as international law as well as domestic law that followed. So we are in bad shape here and this kind of vicious, authoritarian brutality and cruelty in our prison and policing system is a symptom of a problem that is really afflicting the Americans’ soul , it might be in a larger western cultural problem, interestingly the factor that most leads to non-recidivism among prisoners is conversion to Islam in prison.

You can give prisoners vocational training, you can give them all sorts of things and the one thing that keeps them from coming back to prison is if they convert to Islam while in prison.

So that might be a sign that living in vibrant religion is something that could renew the West and renew America. I do not see it happening overnight though but we will see what happens whether these images and these reports are calling attention to a horrific truth that the Americans need to face and then do something about it.     

AHK/HMV

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