America's Prisons are Worse than Iran's

Will Grigg
Oct. 23, 2012

Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers arrested in Iran after accidentally crossing that country’s border with Iraq. He eventually spent more than two years incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including four months in solitary confinement.

After returning to the United States, Bauer became involved in an investigation of prison conditions in California. He focused on the conditions of inmates confined in Security Housing Units, or SHUs – a severe form of solitary confinement.

InCalifornia, inmates are often sentenced to SHUs by special tribunals for entirely arbitrary reasons. They aren’t permitted access to attorneys or allowed to see the evidence against them, which is usually provided by anonymous informants. Solitary confinement – which has severe and lasting psychological effects -- can last indefinitely, and often ends only when the inmate agrees to inform on somebody else. While in the SHUs the inmates are held in windowless cells and denied such rudimentary decencies as clocks, mattresses, and privacy when using the toilet.

Bauer doesn’t minimize the cruelty of Iranian prisons, or the magnitude of the injustice he suffered. He nonetheless came to believe that in some ways inmates in theU.S.prison system – the largest in the world – are treated worse than those imprisoned by the Islamic Republic of Iran.