The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Prisons.

• Author: Fruchtbaum, Harold

Human Rights Watch, New York, 1993 303 pp. $20. ISBN 1-56432-101-0

"Imprisonment", Human Rights Watch states in its Global Report on Prisons, "is by no means a marginal issue:" Each year tens of millions are confined. "Condemned for often serious offenses, without powerful supporters, often poor and inarticulate, disproportionately comprising members of minorities suffering from discrimination ...and removed from public view, prisoners are highly vulnerable to our worst impulses." As the Global Report shows, the findings of a six-year Human Rights Watch investigation of prison conditions in 20 countries confirm this. For example, "in country after country, punishments meted out within the prisons are cruel, humiliating and frequently applied in an...