America’s Barbarous Prisons: A Daily Crime Against Humanity - World Socialist Web Site

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America’s barbarous prisons: A daily crime against humanity - World Socialist Web Site

Excerpt:

Sickening images released in the last week concerning the deaths of two inmates trapped in America’s gulag, the largest prison population in the world, have outraged millions of people in the US and internationally.

Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old black man, died in the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia on September 12, 2022. Photos released by the family attorney last week show Thompson’s body covered with insects and lesions before he died in the jail.

Joshua McLemore, a 29-year-old white man who was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, starved to death in the Jackson County Jail in southern Indiana in August 2021. In a lawsuit filed last week, a lawyer for the family revealed that for nearly 20 days, McLemore was kept in solitary confinement despite displaying no aggressive behavior.

These two cases, representative of the thousands of cases of abuse, torture and outright murder in US prisons every year, refute the cynical and hypocritical claims proffered by President Joe Biden and the Democratic and Republican parties that capitalist America is a bastion of “freedom” and “human rights.” The emaciated corpses of McLemore and Thompson, left to rot in deplorable, inhuman cells, are not aberrations, but the daily reality of the American capitalist gulag.

The initial article about these two cases on the WSWS won a wide audience, with nearly 100,000 readers in less than a week. These readers were responding not only to the exposure of shocking atrocities, but to the stark contrast between the official US posturing about human rights and the reality facing working people.

The courageous and award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger commented on the disturbing photos this past weekend on Twitter: “Look, and recoil at, the photos below. They were taken in the barbaric prison system to which the UK and US and Australia conspire to send Julian Assange, an innocent man whose only ‘crime’ is real journalism.”