In some US prisons, echoes of Abu Ghraib

Many of these same dynamics were at work in Abu Ghraib, where inexperienced American reservists were charged with guarding large numbers of Iraqi detainees. "In Iraq, on top of those huge gaps in race and culture increasing tensions, you get language barriers that for the most part are insurmountable," says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice reform think tank in Washington. "In the day-to-day interactions, the prisoners become dehumanized because there's no communication, and much less sympathy or compassion for anyone's plight."

Such dehumanization is usually a key ingredient when abuse occurs, say experts. In California, where allegations of widespread abuse throughout the system have prompted a state Senate investigation, experts blame overcrowding, a gang culture, and a poorly educated workforce for creating a culture of dehumanization. That has been exacerbated by guards protecting one another.

"There is a code of silence in California prisons that turns good officers to bad," says Richard Steffen, staff director for the Senate Government Oversight Committee looking into the abuse. "They are forced not to report wrongdoing because if they do, they could be ostracized."

California is one of a handful of states where no prisons are accredited by the American Correctional Association (ACA), the national organization of professional correctional officials. Out of the nation's almost 1,600 prisons, about half are fully ACA accredited. To win that designation, correctional officers have to be fully trained, and the facilities must be fully transparent - which means community members have access so that if there are abuses, they can be addressed.

"I believe that when abuses are brought to the attention of directors of corrections, wardens, and jail managers, they're fully investigated, and appropriate sanctions are taken, including dismissal from position and prosecution, when appropriate," says James Gondles, executive director of the ACA.

But plenty of inmates in places like Texas, which since the 1999 court ruling has been working to reform its prisons, still find too many correctional officials uninterested in abuse allegations. While Roderick "Keith" Johnson was serving time for passing a bad check in the Allred prison in Wichita Falls, Texas, he claims he was made a sex slave by rival gangs of inmates. He pleaded for help from all levels of the prison system, right up to the commissioner, but claims he was ignored.

He's now suing, and his case will be heard in July. "Seeing those pictures of those people in Iraq and the way they were abused, I saw a lot of similarities with what goes on here," says Mr. Johnson, who's out of prison and helping other ex-offenders reenter local communities. "At least there you've got pictures to show what was happening, but here we don't, so it harder to prove."

Even Mr. Gondles admits that abuses do occur in US prisons. "But I don't believe that it's endemic in American jails and prisons," he says. "And what happened in one institution in Iraq is not representative of what goes on in America."

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