Torture behind bars: right here in the United States of America.

• Author: Bierma, Paige
• Position: Cover Story

A thirteen-year-old boy is taken from outside his mother's home to a police interrogation room where he is subjected to electroshock and beaten until he confesses to a murder. Johannesburg, South Africa, 1976? No. Chicago, 1991. Guards enter a prisoner's concrete cell, shackle and gag him, and tell him he's going for a "bath." The prisoner is led to a tub of scalding water in the infirmary, in which he is placed naked, still restrained and gagged, and held down by several guards for thirty minutes. He suffers second- and third-degree burns over 30 per cent of his body. Chile, 1974? No. California, 1992.

The kind of torture most of us might imagine taking place only under ruthless dictatorships is astonishingly commonplace right here in the United States, in our prisons, jails, and police stations.

In Chicago, internal city investigations have documented more than fifty incidents of torture committed by police officers. At the super-maximum-security Pelican Bay Prison in California, a class-action lawsuit charges that physical and psychological torture is part of the daily routine. And in Mississippi's jails, conditions "unfit for human habitation" and a record-high number of jailhouse deaths have prompted a US. Department of Justice civil-rights investigation. These cases--and many others--indicate that government employees working in jails and prisons have committed acts against their captive populations that fall under the United Nations' definition of torture.

"Torture" is, according to the U.N.'s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, "the purposeful infliction of severe pain or suffering on a detainee by public officials or with their acquiescence ... to gain information, to obtain a confession, to punish, to intimidate, or to terrorize." And, although the US. Government is quick to condemn a foreign country--Cuba, for example--for human-rights abuses, it refuses to denounce torture on its own soil.

Chicago

Within hours of a gang-related shooting on the night of September 25, 1991, police pulled up in front of Carolyn Wiggins's house in Chicago and arrested her thirteen-year-old son Marcus.

"He was on the pay phone outside talking to his girlfriend and they pulled up by the phone and grabbed him. I was right there across the street on the porch and [a friend] yelled, |They got your son!' recalls Wiggins, an African-American woman born and raised on Chicago's south side.

Wiggins ran across the street to Marcus, thinking they were picking him up for violating curfew. But she was told he was being taken in for questioning and that she could not accompany him in the squad car.

At the police station, Marcus was held for twenty-four hours, illegally questioned without a juvenile officer present, and--according to Marcus and his psychologist--beaten and tortured until he confessed to murder.

Detectives first handcuffed Marcus to a wall in an interrogation room and, after he denied any knowledge of the murder, punched him repeatedly in the chest. Later, according to a civil suit filed on Marcus's behalf last year, officers entered the room with a "box with a round knob on it and two cords extending from it."

"They brought in a box--it was silver--they put it on my hands. They turned it on, and I remember it burning my hands and my head went back," Marcus said at a press conference announcing the filing of the lawsuit.

Marcus, now sixteen, still suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, according to his psychologist. At the slightest reminder of the incident--the sound of a police siren or a meeting with his lawyers--Marcus is apt to retreat even further into himself, curl up in the fetal position, and suck his thumb, his mother says.

"Marcus displays the classical symptoms of stress syndrome," says Antonio Martinez, the boy's psychologist, who is also director of the Institute for Survivors of Torture in Chicago. Those symptoms include "regression to an earlier age, nightmares, headaches, and stuttering."

Although Martinez usually sees patients who were tortured in other countries, he is currently treating four other people who were allegedly tortured by the Chicago police, one of whom, he says, is an elderly Latina woman.

"Torture is about rendering the victim powerless. It is the worst violation of human rights a person can endure," Martinez says.

"It doesn't surprise me at all [that torture happens in Chicago] because it is not just a political problem but a societal one," he adds. "The police are receiving a message to control a class of people that is perceived as dangerous, which is not always the case. In the case of Marcus, he didn't do anything; he just belongs to a certain class of people."

A juvenile-court judge threw out Marcus Wiggins's confession on the grounds that it was coerced. The state attorney general's office has appealed that decision, however, and the civil and criminal cases have been held up in court for more than a year.

Chicago police spokesman William Davis says Wiggins's allegations are under investigation, but he won't comment on the findings. The FBI and Chicago's Office of Professional Standards (OPS), also investigating the case, have no comment.

Commander Jon Burge--accused in Wiggins's civil suit of encouraging the violent behavior of his officers that night--was suspended from the police department just two months after Marcus's arrest. The suspension was for electroshocking and beating Andrew Wilson, a suspected cop killer, back in 1982.

Wilson, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of two police officers, claims Burge and two other detectives beat a confession out of him. Wilson testified in a 1989 civil suit that Burge and other officers burned him over a radiator and electroshocked him by attaching wires from a black box to both of his ears and cranking a handle on top of the box.

"They was kicking at me; they was punching me," Wilson testified. "Somebody grabbed the bag out of the garbage can, he stuck it over my head and he had his hand on my neck, and I could hardly breathe. I was like suffocating and so I was struggling and they was still hitting on me, so I bit a hole through the bag."

Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1982 murder of two Chicago police officers. In 1987, the conviction was overturned and his confession quashed on grounds it had been coerced. At a new trial, at which the confession was not used, Wilson was convicted again and sentenced to life without parole.

Meanwhile, Wilson pursues his civil suit. The first trial lasted eight weeks and ended in a hung jury. The second produced a rather unusual finding: Wilson's constitutional rights had been violated, the city of Chicago had a de-facto policy of authorizing police to physically abuse suspected cop killers, but the jury exonerated all the officers and the city. That decision has been appealed, reversed, and is headed back for yet another trial.

A second city of Chicago investigation revealed that Burge had participated in or had knowledge of fifty cases of electroshock, "bagging" (placing a plastic bag over a suspect's head to the point of near suffocation), or excessive beating during interrogations in the 1970s and 1980s. All of...