Former Prisoners Challenge the Legacy of Torture in Chicago Jails

The Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal brought back a lot of memories for Aaron Patterson. The methods used to humiliate and extract information from Iraqi prisoners sounded chillingly like the methods of torture experienced by Patterson and over 60 other African-American men in Chicago, Illinois.According to an internal investigation by the Chicago Police Department, a police commander and his officers tortured Patterson and the others during the 1970s and 1980s in the south side district known as Area Two. Electric shocks to the genitals, beatings designed not to leave marks, and infliction of psychological terror, including games of Russian roulette, were all tactics former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and the officers under his command used to extract confessions from subjects, whether they were guilty or not, the investigation found. [more]