South by Southwest: Prison news from around the Keys

Monday, December 18, 2006

Prison news from around the Keys

Not far from the Florida Keys, the Bush brothers have their hands full with prisoner stories - The questions of guilt or innocence, of fair treatment, of what to do in the face of these murky issues has been a tough one for all leaders. But lead they must.

Governor Jeb Bush has suspended Florida's death penalty, according to the New York Times. The death penalty has been under fire in recent years. The Governor of Illinois also suspended the death penalty when it was found that a number of innocent men had been convicted. Now the difficulty is about how the death penalty is being carried out. Quoting from Adam Liptak's (12/16/06) article,

Gov. Jeb Bush yesterday suspended all executions in Florida, citing a troubled execution on Wednesday and appointing a commission to consider the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injections.
Hours later, a federal judge ruled that the lethal injection system in California violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

OCP George Bush, maintains that he is the leader, saying in all cases, "I am the decider." He decided early on that people accused of being terrorists were to be treated under different rules. But as information has slowly emerged the courts and Congress have decided that U.S. law must apply. OCP, as commander in chief, continues to bear responsibility for the maintenance of the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There is an excellent and very thorough NYT story about "Gitmo." A new modern facility, Camp 6, was recently opened. Planned to come in at $24 million, Kellog Brown and Root, the contractor actually got $37 million. None of the detainees qualify to use many of the improvements added to the prison, since it started as a series of open cages.

On September 14 a number of "high value" detainees, considered to be very dangerous, were sent to Guantanamo from secret prisons around the world. Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris is the commander of the Guantanamo task force. To quote from the Camp 6 story,

Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.

(Harris) added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

At the same time many prisoners are being repatriated or turned loose. They were determined not to belong in Guantanamo. From the same NYT story we learned that a number of detainees have recently been released, 38 classified as no longer enemy combatants, and 15 sent home to their families in Saudi Arabia. The International Herald Tribune (12/17/06) carried a similar story of a number of detainees leaving Guantanamo. To quote,

The U.S. military repatriated 18 detainees from Guantanamo Bay over the weekend to Afghanistan, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Libya and Bangladesh, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.
The men, flown out of the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba on Friday, were all transferred to the custody of governments in their native countries except for one Yemeni detainee, who was released without conditions, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler.
The detainees, held for years at the isolated detention center without being charged, were cleared for departure by a military review process that assesses whether detainees have intelligence value or pose a threat to the United States. The military does not provide details about individual cases.
Since the prison opened in January 2002, about 380 detainees have been released from Guantanamo. About 395 prisoners are still held on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban, including roughly 85 others cleared to leave for other countries, Peppler said.

Construction is not over in Cuba. A USA Today story details the planned construction of a huge $125 million compound (also to be built by KBR) that will be used to hold war crimes trials for the prisoners. Quoting from the story,

The compound, designed to accommodate as many as 1,200 people, would include dining areas, work spaces and sleeping accommodations for administrative personnel, lawyers, journalists and others involved in trials at the isolated detention center in southeast Cuba.
It would create a total of three courtrooms on the base to allow for simultaneous trials, and a separate high-security area to house the detainees on trial.
"We need to build more courtrooms, and we want to do multiple trials," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman. He said the government hopes to begin construction as soon as possible to be ready for trials no later than July 1.
Human rights groups and foreign governments have called on the Bush administration to close Guantanamo, saying detainees are being held illegally, but the planned construction of new facilities underscores its permanence.

The U.S. criminal justice system is far from perfect. The death penalty is too final for my sensibilities. And the saga of the current U.S. administration's having to be "dragged, kicking and screaming" towards appropriate use of the justice system with detainees, is just appalling. Given the above enumerated figures regarding income to contractor KBR and the current number of detainees, it works out to $52,258 per detainee. And that does not count any of the previous expenditures or current military operating costs. I know, these are all the bad guys! But keeping them somewhere where U.S. laws did not apply has been mighty expensive.

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