Political and Legal Opposition
A report by the United Methodist Church concluded that the extreme isolation of the unit was cruel and unusual punishment. A 38 page report by Amnesty International said that the HSU was violating the international standards of treatment of prisoners.
A lawsuit was filed in behalf of prisoners Silvia Baraldini and Susan Rosenberg. It challenged regulations that allowed the isolation of prisoners based on their political beliefs or affiliations. Judge Parker said in his ruling that: '"The treatment of the plaintiffs has skirted elemental standards of human decency. The exaggerated security, small group isolation and staff harassment serve to constantly undermine the inmates' morale." He ordered the Bureau of Prisons to rewrite its regulations and transfer the prisoners into the general prison population .
In response to mounting opposition the Bureau of Prisons closed the facility in 1988.
Read more about this topic: High Security Unit
Famous quotes containing the words political and, political, legal and/or opposition:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)