Pubdate: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: DeWayne Wickham HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES SHAME OUR COUNTRY When it comes to human rights abuses, Brenda Smith can tell you some awful stories. She can knot your throat with tales of male guards who sexually abused female inmates. Tales of women prisoners, some impregnated by guards, forced to give birth with shackles on their legs. The most disturbing thing you'll hear from Smith, a Washinton attorney, is that these brutalities happened not in some banana republic but right here in the United States. Four years ago, Smith convinced a federal judge in the District of Columbia that such practices constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately, the judge's ruling against the shackling of pregnant inmates and the supervision of female prisoners by men applies only in the nation's capital, the judicial district in which it was rendered. In the rest of this country, they are still legal. It's this cruel reality -- and a long list of other offenses -- that has caused Amnesty International to declare that "There is a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations in the U.S.A." In a 151-page report issued Tuesday, the watchdog organization says police officers, prison guards and immigration officials in this country regularly subject people -- most of them minorities -- to inhuman and degrading treatment. Amnesty International also condemns the United States for indefinitely jailing most people who seek asylum here, for its use of the death penalty and for exporting arms and security equipment to governments with a history of human rights abuse. The list of offenses doesn't rise to the level of Serbia's ethnic cleansing, the horrific tribal massacres in Rwanda, or Myanmar's brutal suppression of its democracy movement. But it still paints a disturbing picture of human rights abuses in this country -- one that far too many Americans fail to recognize. "We are so accustomed to viewing ourselves as above this kind of behavior that we are reluctant to look at things that happen here at home and think of them as human rights abuses," Smith says. In other words, we're in denial. We know what a human rights abuse is when we see it in China, El Salvador or Iraq, but we can't fathom its existence in this country. It's inhumane to hogtie prisoners or strap a 50,000-volt stun-belt to their bodies. It's unwise to give male guards unrestricted supervision of female prisoners and unconscionable to aid the security forces of foreign governments with monstous human rights records. Even before Amnesty International focused its attention, a lot of us knew we had a problem. What distinguishes us from many of other targets of Amnesty International's human rights reports is our ability to make things better. DeWayne Wickham is a columnist for Gannett News Services. - --- Checked-by: Rolf Ernst