Prisoner abuse

Prisoner abuse is the mistreatment of persons while they are under arrest or incarcerated. Abuse falling into this category includes:

• Physical abuse: Needless beating, hitting, or other corporal punishment.
• Psychological abuse: Taunting, sleep deprivation, or other forms of psychological abuse, occasionally white noise
• Sexual abuse: Forced intercourse, genital mutilation, or other forms of sexual abuse.
• Other abuse: Refusal of essential medication, humiliation, etc.
• Enhanced interrogation: methods implemented in the War on Terror purportedly needed to extract information since other techniques would not yield results.
• Torture: any act by which severe pain, whether physical or psychological, is intentionally inflicted

Psychological abuse

White noise

The endless playing of random static (similar to that of unused TV frequencies) with no pattern; this can cause extreme discomfort and disorientation.

Verbal abuse

Prisoners may be subject to taunting, heckling, profanity, and malicious lies by prison authorities. Guards and other authorities may use verbal abuse as a means of frightening or demoralizing prisoners to make them more compliant, or simply out of sadism.

Enablement of Sexual Violence

Prisoners are sometimes intentionally housed with inmates known to have raped other prisoners, or protection from known rapists may be purposely withheld from the prisoners. These practices create a very high incidence of rape in US prisons, which was the topic of the 2001 report No Escape from Human Rights Watch.

See also

• Prisoner rape