Inside America's Black Box: A Rare Look at the Violence of Incarceration (Warning: Distressing)

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/inside-americas-black-box.html



An inmate held in solitary testified that his monthly mental health sessions lasted only five to 10 minutes. He cut himself with razor blades and used his blood to write a plea for help.

But some weeks ago, The New York Times received more than 2,000 photographs that evidence suggests were taken inside the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama. Some show inmates as they are being treated in a cramped, cluttered examination room. Others are clinical: frontal portraits, close-ups of wounds.

It is hard to imagine a cache of images less suitable for publication — they are full of nudity, indignity and gore. It is also hard to imagine photographs that cry out more insistently to be seen.

(snip)

St. Clair is known to be a deeply troubled institution in a state with an overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated prison system. Alabama has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates and, as measured by the most recent counts of homicides available, its deadliest prisons, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit civil rights organization in Birmingham. Suicide is epidemic as well — there have been 15 in the past 15 months.

(snip)

The photos show dozens of wounded men. One had been stabbed at least 10 times. Another had a hole in his lip you could stick a pencil through. A pair of handcuffed wrists displayed 15 precise slashes. There was a recurring palette of pale red and sickly, Mercurochrome yellow. One man’s back had a shiv at least an inch wide still buried in it, right between the shoulder blades.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Sunday kick.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

2. K&R!