Prisoner abuse

The endless playing of random static (similar to that of unused TV frequencies) with no pattern; this can cause extreme discomfort and disorientation.

Prisoners may be subject to taunting, heckling, profanity, and malicious lies by prison authorities. Guards and other authorities may use verbal abuse as a means of frightening or demoralizing prisoners to make them more compliant, or simply out of sadism.

Prisoners are sometimes intentionally housed with inmates known to have raped other prisoners, or protection from known rapists may be purposely withheld from the prisoners. These practices create a very high incidence of rape in US prisons, which was the topic of the 2001 report No Escape from Human Rights Watch.[2][3]

The experience of forced strip searches can be experienced as a traumatic event similarly to that of rape especially by female prisoners, escpecially when combined with habitual body cavity searches. The prevalence of CCTV in modern correctional facilities and the generally indiscreet nature of strip searches, often with a number of prison guards observing, usually adds to the experienced humiliation. Strip searches are often arbitrarily used under various pretences, when the actual ambition is to assert control and predominance as well as to intimidate the subjected prison inmates.[4]

Forced enemas are commonly acknowledged as being uncomfortable and also degrading for the receiving person, especially when practiced in a prison environment designated by a stark imbalance in power. Such a treatment can also be registered as a form of physical abuse as well as sexual abuse, when practiced without consent or forcibly carried out against the will of the subjected prisoner. Physically invasive measures of this kind are often purposefully taken in order to demonstrate predominance and to assert "total control" over an incarcerated individual. By the application of a forced enema in a situation of incarceration one of the last remaining spheres of privacy as well as personal autonomy is stripped away from the prison inmate. As the prisoner's generally autonomous instances of bowel movement are hereby unnaturally taken out of his or her own decision-making and forcibly placed under the arbitration of prison authorities, "total control" over the inmate is implemented in a near finalizing manner. Therefore such a procedure can lead to experiences of emotional distress and psychological trauma for the defenceless detainee, which is typically desired by the authorities to undermine the prisoner's mental resilience.
As a physical consequence of this practice, anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and rectal prolapse can occur when administered excessively and without medical care. Forced enemas have evidentially been used for example at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp by the United States. In certain cases it was administered under the pretence to counter a prisoner's dehydration. Forms of medical justification were employed whenever enemas were in fact used as a coercive tool. Despite the pretext of medical need, it was later admitted in certain cases, that this was in fact untrue. The CIA administered enemas to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani among others.[5][6]

"Enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for U.S. torture methods implemented in the War on Terror purportedly needed to extract information from detainees. Examples include use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, starvation, thirst, and sexual humiliation.[7]

After a September 2020 incident inside the Scorpion Prison in the Tora Prison complex of Egypt, where four inmates and four officers died, the authorities opted to collectively punish all the 800-900 prisoners. They reconstructed all the cells into rooms of psychological torture, leaving no source of ventilation and electricity. The inmates were also strictly kept from communicating to the others.[8]