Defying repeated orders from his guards, the inmate-a 29-year-old man–refused to remove the pillowcase he’d placed over his head. As punishment, he was strapped, naked, to a metal restaining chair for 16 hours. Scores of other prisoners had previously received similar treatment, some of them left sitting in their own waste. Shortly after being released from the chair, the prisoner collapsed and died from heart failure, resulting from a blood clot that developed during his confinement.

Prison officials hastily devised a cover story, claiming that the inmate died as a result of beating his head against the wall. But the events leading up to the prsioner’s death had been recorded on videotape. Legal action by the inmate’s family forced out the facts, resulting in a national scandal and the resignation of the official in charge of the prison.

Did this occur at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, circa 2003? No–it took place at Utah’s Point of the Mountain State Penitentiary in 1997. Lane McCotter, cashiered from his post as head of the state Department of Corrections because of the scandal, was hired to head Management & Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based “private” (actually corporatist) corrections company. Under McCotter’s personal supervision, MTC operated a Santa Fe, New Mexico, county jail that was excoriated in a March 2003 Justice Department report for systematic abuses and inhumane conditions.

The Justice Department implemented a three-stage plan to address the Sante Fe situation. First, it threatened to sue the jail–and by extension, MTC - unless conditions quickly improved. Second, it relocated 100 federal prisoners who had been incarcerated in the notorious facility. Third, it hired McCotter to help oversee the reconstruction of Iraq’s prison system and to train Iraqi prison guards.

McCotter told the Salt Lake Tribune that his name was on two lists of qualified candidates, one composed bythe Justic Department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons and the other, by the National Institute of Corrections. Justic Department spokesman Mark Corallo told the Tribune that McCotter “came highly recommended,” but pointedly declined to say who issued that radiant endorsement.

McCotter worked with Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s disgraced former commandant, and even escorted Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on a tour of the prison. There’s no evidence that he played a role in any of the hideous crimes subsequently committed there (which may include, according to plausible reports, sexual molestation of Iraqi children by guards or interrogators). But the fact that his name was on two short lists for the position of Abu Ghraib says a great deal about the culture of impunity that nurtured atrocities committed there last year. It also offers a usefully unsettling glimpse of the prevailing priorities in our increasingly nationalized penal system.

At present, America imprisons 2.1 million of the estimated world population of roughly 8 million prisoners. Former Treasury Department official Paul Craig Roberts notes that between 1980 and 2000, as our national population grew by 21 percent, “the number of state and federal inmates soared by 312%.”

This astonishing increase reflects, in part, the importation of violent crime via unchecked immigration, and the cultvation of even more through the disruption of the family. But the prison boom, like Fed-driven economic booms, reflects government intervention. Since 1994, Washington has dispensed more than $8 billion to states for prison construction.

“Forty years ago, prisons were often seen as dark blotches on the landscapes,” writes James Bovard in his indispensable new book The Bush Betrayal. But this has changed: “In small towns and depressed areas across the nation, politicos applaud government policies that turn other people into fodder because it keeps their own local prison-based economies booming.”

In our federal system, law enforcement - including incarceration - was intended to be almost exclusively a state concern. For decades, Washington has been steadily absorbing police powers from the states, a development constitutionalists properly view with alarm. As Bovard points out, the growing prison population abets that same nationalizing trend: “Prisoners become tokens redeemable for extra federal aid for housing, road building, environmental concerns, and social spending…Local governments also collect federal windfalls because most prisoners have zero income –thus making the locales appear to be poverty zones.”

Currently, one of every 142 Americans - and one of every 75 American men–can be found serving time. Given the relentless expansion of the criminal code, the growing trend toward purely political prosecutions like the Martha Stewart case, and the incentives driving cash-starved governments to treat prisons as a growth industry, that ratio will almost certainly increase - unless enough Americans push the federal behemoth back into its constitutional cage.

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