http://www.democrats.com/ABC Nightline reports "Consider the following scenario: Some rather frightening prisoners - ones that might not elicit your sympathy - are placed in a situation where many are abused. Complaints are made to the proper authorities; it remains unclear if any of them made their way to chief executive George W. Bush. Those complaints largely go nowhere. Then months later, photographic evidence of the abuse emerges, whipping up a media outcry and a promise by Bush to get to the bottom of the atrocities. This scenario is not just the story of Abu Ghraib circa 2004. It was also a prisoner abuse scandal from 1997 in Brazoria County, Texas, when Bush was governor... Because of a prison abuse case in 1972, Judge William Wayne Justice eventually ruled that a sentence to a Texas prison amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. 'It's like a picture of the second circle of hell that emerges from that judgment,' Elsner said."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/World/texas_prison_abuse_040826-1.htmlPrisoner Abuse Echoes
Texas Case Sheds Light on Abu Ghraib Scandal
Human rights abuses similar to those revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have occurred regularly in U.S. prisons, but they have sparked far less attention and outrage, critics say.
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Elsner is the author of Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons, a book that takes a critical view of the human rights situation in the U.S. penal system. He says he "was not that surprised" when he first heard allegations that U.S. soldiers had abused Iraqi detainees, "especially when it became clear that two of the correctional officers who were involved in Abu Ghraib actually had been prison guards in the United States."
Elsner is referring to Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who recently announced he plans to plead guilty to some charges, and Spc. Charles Graner Jr. Both men are military police with the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Maryland.
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Others from the U.S. penal system were involved in Iraqi prisons. In May, ABC News reported that four of the six former state prison commissioners chosen by the Bush administration to help set up prisons in Iraq had left their previous posts after allegations of neglect, brutality and prisoner deaths.
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let's see: pedophiles go to the Catholic church and sadists do prison work. what a wonderful world.