Weekend Edition
August 30 / 31, 2008
Torture in Cook County Jail
By STANLEY HOWARD
Stanley Howard, he's one of the pardoned Illinois death row prisoners, and still behind bars on another bogus charge. He wrote this about the nightmare at Cook County Jail, where they just had a federal expose.
After a 17-month investigation concerning the conditions in the Cook County Jail, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald issued a scathing report calling for change and reforms.
The 98-page report on the nation's largest county jail was released July 17 and sent to County Board President Todd Stroger and Sheriff Thomas Dart with its findings and recommendations. It cited many cases of gross "medical negligence, mismanagement and abusive behavior by guards," which led to "unnecessary deaths, amputation and routine inmate beatings."
The outside world would be shocked to hear stories such as that of an inmate left untreated for a gunshot wound, who developed sepsis and died; a female inmate who suffered from HIV and died after a preventable infection went untreated; and an inmate beaten so bad by guards that his dentures were kicked out and he was sent to the hospital on a respirator.
I SPENT time in the jail's maximum security unit between 1984 and 1987, and personally witnessed and experienced the kind of atrocities cited in the report. I cannot count the number of times I've seen a guard or guards punch, kick, slap or beat down an inmate without provocation.
And when I was sent to the jail from death row in 2001 for a court hearing--in which I was trying to prove that I was tortured by Chicago police into signing a coerced confession to a murder I did not commit--I soon discovered that nothing had changed.
Please read the entire article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/howard08302008.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
