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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 35KB | 670 lines

<text> <title> United States </title> <article> <hdr> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 Human Rights Watch: United States </hdr> <body> Human Rights Watch, through its various divisions, increased its work on U.S. human rights and humanitarian law violations in 1991. Government actions relating to the war in the Persian Gulf produced human rights concerns at home and abroad. In January and February, the Fund for Free Expression criticized the Defense Department's policies restricting news-media coverage of the war, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's program of questioning Arab-Americans in the United States. In November, Middle East Watch reported on violations of the laws of war by both sides to the Persian Gulf War which had resulted in needless civilian casualties. In July, following the videotaped beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, Human Rights Watch released a report criticizing the federal government for its passivity in responding to the problem of police brutality in the United States. In November, Human Rights Watch released a study of prison conditions in the United States, following an Americas Watch newsletter in May on prison conditions in Puerto Rico. The Fund for Free Expression issued a series of reports on U.S. free expression issues, including "SLAPP" libel suits used to intimidate community and public interest organizations, censorship of the student press, and the erosion of the right to freedom of expression in decisions of the Supreme Court's 1990-91 term. The Fund also criticized the Bush Administration's proposal for secret courts to try suspected alien "terrorists," comparing it with similar provisions in other countries criticized by the State Department in its annual human rights report. The Fund took part in a national coalition to overturn the Supreme Court's decision upholding federal regulations that barred federally funded family planning clinics from counseling clients on the availability of abortion as an option. Helsinki Watch and the Fund urged Congress to remove from the Immigration and Naturalization Services "lookout list" persons who were listed solely because of their political beliefs. Prison Conditions In November, after a year-long study entailing visits to more than twenty institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico, including federal, state and INS institutions, as well as jails, Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled Prison Conditions in the United States. The report raises numerous concerns about the human rights aspects of incarceration in the United States and about the difficulties in securing access to prisons. One of the most troubling aspects of the human rights situation in U.S. prisons is the use of super-maximum-security facilities (called "maxi-maxis" in prison jargon) to confine inmates deemed especially dangerous. Conditions in these facilities are particularly difficult to bear and often fall below the minimum standards established by the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. In addition to the federal system, currently thirty-six states have such facilities. Inmates confined to maxi-maxis are essentially sentenced twice: once by the court, to a certain period of imprisonment, and the second time by the prison administration, to confinement in maxi-maxis. This second sentencing is open-ended, limited only by the overall length of an inmate's sentence, and is meted out without the benefit of counsel. Among the violations of the U.N. minimum standards observed by Human Rights Watch in the course of researching the report were: -- Uninterrupted extended confinement in windowless, badly ventilated cells, such as in the Q-Wing of the Florida State Prison at Starke. -- Lack of access to educational programs, as in the elimination in 1991 of all teaching and counseling staff positions at the prison in Southport, New York. -- Denial or sharp reduction of time outdoors, in violation of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules which mandate at least one hour a day of outdoor exercise. -- The use of handcuffs as a disciplinary measure, as seen in the Broward institution for women in Florida. -- The use of collective punishment at the Krome INS detention center in Florida and the Otis Bantum Center on Rikers Island in New York. Human Rights Watch made the following recommendations regarding the human rights aspects of imprisonment in the United States: -- Maximum-maximum security facilities should be used only under supervision that is independent from correctional administration. Even then, they must meet the test of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. -- In jails, classification and record keeping must be improved, to avoid situations in which nonviolent offenders are housed with dangerous and predatory criminals. Limits should be imposed on the duration of a sentence that may be served in a jail. In no case should the limit be longer than one year. -- Denial of access to reading matter should never be used as a disciplinary measure. -- Steps should be taken to assure work for all inmates capable of working. -- Prison officials should make every effort to confine inmates as close to their home as possible so as to facilitate the maintenance of family bonds. -- All inmates should have access to telephones. -- Prisons should encourage access for inmates' relatives or friends, since maintaining these bonds gives inmates a better chance of staying out of trouble upon their release. -- The trend in the federal system of granting a diminishing number of furloughs to inmates of minimum security facilities should be reversed, and the granting of furloughs to nonviolent inmates, particularly those serving sentences far from home, should be liberalized. -- In circumstances in which security considerations make it impossible to provide inmates with privacy, guards of the same sex should be used. -- A review of the cases of Cuban inmates in legal limbo all over the country should be undertaken immediately. No inmate should be left in prison without knowing the duration of his or her sentence. -- Incarceration of noncriminal illegal aliens should stop immediately. -- Outside observers should have access to prisons, since access by outside observers is an important way of preventing abuses in prisons. In May, Americas Watch released a newsletter on prison conditions in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The paper found that poor prison conditions stemmed from an overall abdication of authority by prison administrators, that women are singled out for contraband searches, and that the transfer of inmates to prisons in the mainland United States has a detrimental effect on an inmate's bond with relatives and is often used as a disciplinary measure. A version of this paper was presented at a conference on prison conditions in the Caribbean held in May in Trinidad. Police Brutality The brutal and unprovoked beating--fortuitously videotaped by a bystander--by Los Angeles police officers of motorist Rodney King focused world attention on police practices in the United States. In the wake of this event, Human Rights Watch issued a report on an undercovered aspect of the issue--the passivity of the federal government in combating such abuse. The report, issued in July, found that "violations of human rights by local police has become a sort of fault-line in United States legal-political life, causing occasional political earthquakes...yet the federal government has never created effective means of monitoring, much less controlling, abuses." Human Rights Watch argued that this "hands-off" approach treating police brutality as a "local" issue--amounts to an abdication of t