The United States leads the world in the number of people the country puts behind bars.
Although it only has 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 25% of the world’s prison population. The United States is the world’s biggest jailer.
Put another way, one in 99 adults is living behind bars in the United States, and one in 31 adults is subject to some form of correctional control, which includes prison, jail, parole and probation.
The prison population has risen 700% since 1970, and the rate of incarceration for black American men has reached 4,347 per 100,000 Americans, almost 27 times the incarceration rate of Saudi Arabia, a country the United States loves to cite for its human rights abuses.
Is this the kind of country we can all be proud of?
World Leader in Incarceration Rates
As the Prison Policy Initiative explains:
Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country.
Nearly all of the countries with relatively high incarceration rates share the experience of recent large-scale internal conflict. But the United States, which has enjoyed a long history of political stability and hasn’t had a civil war in nearly a century and a half, tops the list.
World Leader in Inmate Mortality Rates
If it’s not shameful enough that the United States is a world leader in rates of incarceration, the country also leads the world in the number of inmate deaths. And it turns out that the state of Florida, where guards have been killing prisoners at a terrifying rate, is the leader here.
In 2014, Florida recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system, an all-time high for the state in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years.
What on earth is going on in Florida’s prisons that would cause the death of so many inmates?
According to The Daily Kos, the causes are various: they include beatings, gassings and poisonings inflicted on prison inmates by their guards.
Florida’s prison system came under increasing scrutiny last year after the circumstances of the 2012 death of mentally ill prisoner Darren Rainey came to light.
According to Reuters,
In June, the American Civil Liberties Union penned a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder calling for a federal investigation into Rainey’s death, saying that the state had attempted to “cover it up.”
The letter said that Rainey was blasted with scalding hot water in a locked closet-sized shower as a punishment at the state’s Dade Correctional Institution in Miami.
After two hours, Rainey was found dead with his skin separated from his body, the letter stated. The water temperature was later measured at 180 degrees (82 Celsius), according to court records.
“These revelations that are coming out are not about incompetence. They’re about guards killing people and public officials working feverishly to cover it up,” Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida said.
The Abuse and Death of Florida Prisoners
With 346 deaths recorded in Florida’s prisons last year, these are not isolated cases of abuse. Take the story of Jerry Washington, who filed a sexual harassment complaint against two officers in the Santa Rosa Correctional Institute. When the officers learned of the complaint, they threatened to kill Jerry, and so he filed another complaint about the death threats.
Afraid for his safety, he wrote his sister a letter and included copies of both of the grievances he had filed. In the letter he tells her that if anything happens to him, she should know that it wasn’t an accident.
Seven days later, Jerry Washington was killed in prison.
Or the story of Randall Jordan-Aparo, who died weeping and gasping for breath on the concrete floor of his prison isolation cell, naked except for his white boxer shorts. According to the Miami Herald, his guards at Franklin Correctional Institution in the Panhandle were angry that the inmate had cursed at a nurse, so they decided to fire nine blasts of noxious gas into his 13-by-8 cell through a slot in the door.
Five hours later, the 27-year-old was found lifeless, face-down on the bare slab, with his mouth and nose pressed to the bottom of the door. A faint orange residue, a byproduct of the gas, covered his hair, legs, toes, torso and mouth.
Justice Must Be Served
Thirty-two prison guards and officers in Florida were fired this past September. All of them had been accused of criminal misconduct or wrongdoing stemming from inmate deaths at four different prisons.
In addition, hundreds of these deaths from 2014 and from previous years are now under investigation by the Department of Justice.
But is firing enough? Shouldn’t these abusive guards also be indicted for murder, and forced to pay the consequences of their sadistic actions?
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