Prisons get tougher

last updated 8 January 2015

Camp Bucca, Iraq

The U.S. military said this week that it was rethinking how best to manage a growing population of Iraqi prisoners, following a violent uprising in late January. The riot took place in Camp Bucca, the largest American military prison in Iraq, housing more than 5,000 alleged insurgents and other prisoners. Using makeshift slingshots, hundreds of prisoners hurled rocks and sand-filled bottles at the guard towers, before retreating beyond the range of the guards’ nonlethal weapons and regrouping for another wave. Eventually, guards fired live rounds at the rioters, and four inmates died. Gen. William Brandenburg, head of military detention, told The Washington Post that Camp Bucca and other prisons would get longer-range weapons and more security cameras, and that guards would be trained to be alert for troublemakers. “We’re detaining a harder-core crowd,” he said, “and so the approach has to be more prisonlike.”