LA Sheriff Orders Inmates to Strip
Posted on Sat Feb 18, 2006 at 06:58:13 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)
by TChris
Where did LA County Sheriff Lee Baca get the idea that he can punish jail inmates by making them stand around naked?
More than 100 inmates at a Los Angeles County jail were ordered to strip naked, had their mattresses taken away and were left with only blankets to cover themselves for a day as Los Angeles Sheriff's Department officials tried to quell racially charged violence that has plagued the jail system for nearly two weeks.
The Sheriff opined that he was acting at "outer edge of our core values," but he's fallen off the edge.
"It comes to a different level of basic human rights if you take away clothing and dignity," said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca's office of independent review.
Buca invoked the "two wrongs make a right" argument, noting that the naked inmates had deprived other inmates of their dignity by fighting with them. He also observed that the naked inmates didn't provoke additional fights, invoking the "it worked and so it's right" defense. Never mind about fundamental standards of human decency.
[Mark] Rosenbaum said holding of inmates in the nude and without mattresses was reminiscent of the infamous images out the scandal over treatment of Iraqi prisoners. "We would be horrified if these methods had taken place at Abu Ghraib," he said. "However effective or ineffective, humiliation and degradation is not a proper procedure for discipline."
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