Define “torture”?
United States: Mentally Ill Mistreated in Prison, Human Rights Watch, 10/22/03
Surprising no one who knows anyone currently or formerly in prison, an estimated 20% of the incarcerated population lacks psychological care.
The Human Rights Watch study finds agreement among jailers, prosecutors and police officers that the closure of mental health facilities throughout the United States has dovetailed with an increase in prisoners who need psychological treatment.
The roots of our current unease over General Boykin’s innappropriately “transparent” comments are apparently as wide as they are deep. A lasting, unquestioned cultural belief that posits wealth as virtuous, poverty as vice and all manner of crime as a question of “weakness” or “evil” is at the heart of not only the epidemic of mental illness in our prisons but a myriad of other critical threats to the enlightenment and the American Constitution.
Subsequent complaints from the Defense Intelligence Agency were referred for investigation to Gen. Boykin. Surprisingly, the General couldn’t find any “pattern of misconduct.”