Prison Brutality

As I went over the socratic seminar questions, number 33 in The Power of One questions caught my eye.  It was one we didn't get the chance to talk about in class, but still a very significant topic.  The question asked about Lieutenant Borman, and his hatred toward the prisoners.  The root of the Lieutenant's hatred lies in the fact that the prisoners are African, and therefore a different skin color than him.  Being white, Lieutenant Borman believes that he is above the prisoners, and that the prisoners should not be treated as equals, but rather like slaves, or animals.  This also leads to why Borman dislikes Peekay and Doc.  Peekay and Doc help the prisoners write letters home to their families, and then sneak their families responses back in the prison to them.  Therefore, Doc and Peekay are very well liked throughout the prison, and this causes Doc and Peekay to treat the African prisoners as equals, which Lieutenant Borman does not believe in.  Now, even though all the warders were very abusive of the prisoners, especially Geel Piet, Lieutenant Borman was the worst.  Eventually, in an attempt to get Geel Piet to confess that Peekay and Doc were sneaking letters in and out of the prison, Lieutenant Borman beats him so bad that he actually kills him.  This brings about the discussion of prison brutality in America's prisons today.  Some people think prison brutality is okay because everyone in prisons is a dirty criminal, and probably deserves it.  I'm here to say that this is not always the case.   Some prisoners are beaten, or even killed and are acutally innocent.  The most recent demonstration of this is with the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.  Almost everyone believed that Troy Davis was innocent, and yet he was still put to death.  Even the people who testified against Troy in his original trial recently spoke out and said that he is innocent, and that they were almost forced by law enforcement to testify against him.  Even with this, and the fact that Troy and others have been insisting that he is innocent since 1989, Troy Davis, most likely an innocent man, was still executed.  Many people claim that the execution of Troy was due to racism. 
Hundreds of event like this occur all the time all over the United States, and must be stopped.  Whether criminals, or innocent people, they are still human beings, and still should be treated that way.  The fact that prisoners are being beaten so harshly that they are killed is a huge problem in the American prison system.  It also shows that something like what happened to Geel Piet is very much a reality in America, and something should be done to stop it.