Torture: America's Brutal Prisons

The point of this British documentary is to illustrate how the U.S. military abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison derive from America's culture of torturing its own prison population. The argument is fallacious, of course, since the military personnel running Abu Ghraib had little (if any) correctional facility management experience, and there seems to be no evidence to support the claim that America's prison systems are in the business of regularly torturing prisoners. Drawing on isolated and unrelated examples from jails in four states (including cases at least 10 years old), filmmaker Nick London's Torture: America's Brutal Prisons insists that prison guards routinely engage in physical violence against defenseless inmates, but while there is documented abuse (and no one would condone such actions as blasts of chemical spray at close range or savage beatings), the film errs in its half-reporting: the obviously inherent danger of correctional work is never addressed, among other oversights. Granted, the documentary scores points when prison authorities idiotically defend their actions, with the most egregious example being the grandstanding Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio's insistence that an inmate succumbing to multiple severe injuries was actually the victim of self-inflicted wounds. It's a richly stupid moment, one that almost makes this slanted reportage work—almost, but not quite. Optional. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)