Channel 4 in the UK ran a piece last year called, Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons which I picked up via metafilter.

The link above (with absolutely, completely not safe for work embedded video) goes to an archived version of the video and an accompanying article about same. A few choice samples include:

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’ If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking. Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

Iraq? Nope, the great state of Texas (admittedly, difficult to tell apart sometimes). The Channel 4 piece is a litany of torture - sometimes resulting in death - that would make the most hardened fan of prison-as-punishment cringe. And it’s not hearsay, testimony from disgruntled prisoners. It is in fact all on video, in photographs and in first hand accounts by the guards themselves.

Read and watch the above if you can stomach it. And then think about the massive self deception we practice here in the US. We know; we’ve always known. Why else would jokes about prison rape be common fare on the nightly comedy shows? It seems nobody wants to admit what’s going on until they have a photograph or video shoved in front of them.

And even then we don’t care. I don’t care what a man did (or, as likely as not nowadays, didn’t) do to land himself in prison. No one deserves to be tortured to death, and even if they did, who the hell are YOU to decide to be the one to do it?