" And further, "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture," shall be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, as well as ".outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.".

             This paper will examine how the rights of U.S. prisoners have been both protected in cases and abused in other cases; it will review (in specifics) how prisoners from the U.S. military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq have been mistreated; it will examine how courts and the executive branch of the United States government have interpreted various prisoner's rights; and other aspects of prisoner rights today and through history will be analyzed.

             A Brief History of Prisoner's Rights in America.

             First, a look at the history of prison conditions and prison reform is appropriate in approaching this topic. The group Human Rights Watch (HRW) (http://www.hrw.org) explains that in the late 1960s, American courts began, for the first time, to "take an active role" in overseeing conditions in prisons. Prior to the courts becoming involved, the U.S. Department of Justice had for many decades pretty much "assumed an extremely deferential posture" as regards correctional facilities under federal and state jurisdictions. That means, individual prison management could run prisons the way they thought was best, which led to myriad abuses and even heinous crimes against prisoners - which will be recounted later in this paper.

             And so, a kind of "hands-off" approach by the courts had, for many years, allowed prisons to determine what rights prisoners should have. But in the 1960s and 1970s, public attention turned toward prison abuses, and "a generation of prison reformers looked to the courts to rectify abuses, garnering an impressive string of legal victories," HRW explained, which lifted the rights of prisoners from near-zero status to far more humanistic, and closer to what non-incarcerated citizens enjoyed.