Russian diplomat: Abuse, deaths in prison custody on the rise in US
“According to a report for 2015 from the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch, the number of prisoners in the United States stood at 2.37 million people, more than in any other country of the world,” said Konstantin Dolgov, ministry’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law. According to US Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Director Charles Samuels, there have been on the average 40% more than projected inmates in prisons over the past ten years. Fifteen penitentiary facilities in the US are 100% overcrowded. The problem of solitary imprisonment still remains unresolved. According to Human Rights Watch, about 100,000 inmates of federal prisons and prisons in states are kept in full isolation. Often, as a results of staying in single confinement cells, inmates self-harm themselves gravely or commit suicides. According to Amnesty International, defendants are often isolated before they face trial… inmates of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York could live in isolation for several months and even years pending a court trial. Inmates don’t practically see the daylight, are deprived of walks in fresh air. Growing abuse in prisons and deaths of inmates were of a special concern. According to information from American Civil Liberties Union, youth, people not in their right mind, pregnant women, elderly people as well as people with restricted abilities often become subjects of abuse in prisons. Cases are not rare in which inmates are discriminated, pregnant women are handcuffed”. He also drew attention to incidents of sexual abuse of inmates by personnel, as well as noted problems with access to medical help. “Medical personnel of correctional facilities ignore chronical diseases that inmates suffer”… undue medical treatment of inmates with mental derangement, in some cases leading to a sharp deterioration of health or deaths. Not a single person has been brought to justice for torture in CIA secret jails, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, democracy and rule of law, Konstantin Dolgov, has told TASS. “On December 9, 2014 the US Senate published a report on torture in CIA secret jails,” Dolgov recalled. “The most meaningful part of the document – more than 6,700 pages – remains secret and the US authorities are still reluctant to make it public. As follows from the report, the inmates of secret jails were subjected to inhuman, humiliating treatment. They were beaten against the wall, kept awake for 180 hours, made to stand long with their handcuffed hands raised up, left without clothes, put in ice-cold baths, locked up in cells with loud music playing non-stop and subjected to forced rectal feeding. Artificial drowning and other cruel methods of questioning were widely used.” According to the diplomat, not a single person in the United States or Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Romania or Britain) has been brought to justice for torture or other cruel treatment or abductions by CIA agents under a secret detentions program. “According to a report by Amnesty International, at least 27 men and one woman were put to death in six states and more than 3,000 others were pending execution in 2015. Moreover, the lethal injections used to exercise capital punishment often result in long pre-death pain and suffering.” Alongside this according to Amnesty International “shocking statistics were published indicating that six convicts of all those previously sentenced to death were fully acquitted in 2015 and that the overall number of crude judicial mistakes in the United States since 1973 has totaled 156.” Moscow points to “crude violations by the US authorities of the norms of international human rights law…
Source: http://tass.ru/en/politics/861509
