http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/louisiana-jail-locks-suicidal-prisoners-in-3-x-3-cages/Even in the context of the United States’ grim and sometimes brutal prison conditions, a story released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties of Louisiana shocks the conscience. The ACLU is protesting treatment of prisoners in one parish jail, who are routinely locked in cages measuring 3 x 3 feet–one-fourth the legally mandated size for caged dogs in the same parish. What makes this story even more sickening is the fact that this treatment is used on prisoners who are suicidal.
We know that placing prisoners in cells or cages too small to lie down in was one of the forms of torture employed at Abu Ghraib and other interrogation sites since the start of the so-called war on terror. Even there, the detainees were most commonly released after a day or two. At the St. Tammany Parish Jail in Covington, Louisiana, the ACLU found, prisoners suffering from mental illness, and deemed at risk of killing themselves, are sometimes held in the tiny cages for weeks or months.
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After the jail determines a prisoner is suicidal, the prisoner is stripped half-naked and placed in a 3′ x 3′ metal cage with no shoes, bed, blanket or toilet, according to numerous interviews conducted with current and former prisoners. Prisoners report they must curl up on the floor to sleep because the cages are too small to let them lie down. Guards frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers. The cages are in a main part of the jail, allowing other prisoners to gawk at those confined in these cages. People have been reportedly held in these cages for days, weeks, and months.