Inside the City Detention Center

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/surkiewicz05152004.html

The litany of horrors at the Baltimore City Detention Center reads like something out of Dickens. The short list:

Officials who routinely take life-sustaining prescription drugs away from new detainees - who then go weeks or even months without proper medical attention.

A woman who slipped and fell in the shower, breaking her arm, waited two weeks before she got her arm X-rayed and a cast put on. Inmates who must wash their clothes in toilets, complaining that if they use the prison laundry service, their clothes aren't returned. Detainees subjected to severe overcrowding, putting them in close proximity to others with serious medical and mental health needs that largely go unmet.

While those problems have a distinctly 19th-century ring, there's a 21st-century twist. The U.S. Department of Justice recognized the deplorable conditions in a 2002 report citing 107 different violations of health and safety and found that the Baltimore City Detention Center violated the constitutional rights of detainees. Inmates, the report stated, "suffer harm or the risk of serious harm from deficiencies in the facility's fire safety protections, medical care, mental health care, sanitation, opportunity to exercise and protection of juveniles."

And last but not least: About 90 percent of the population at the center is detainees who have not been convicted of a crime.

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note the: "not been convicted of a crime."

this is in Baltimore, Md. 30 miles from Wash.D.C., in the land of the free,in the year 2004.

and speaking of medical help:

there are some areas in Washington, D.C. where there is no medical help for pregnant women. (three guesses where these areas are, and the first two guesses don't count)

[DUreader]

1. That 90% figure is the same for abu ghraib

by some reports

[PfNJ]

2. this kind of thing.....

has been going on forever here, maybe the abu-ghraib thing will make people take a second look at our own jails and prisons, especially county/municipal jails, which house the not-yet-convicted.....
there have been stories for years of (virtually always poor) people pleading guilty to some lesser offense they may or may not have committed, and accept a relatively short prison term, just to get out of the county jails, where those who cannot afford bail/their own lawyers, will have to sit for months, or maybe over a year, before getting their trial.....