Human Rights advocates counter that that some of those at Guantanamo are being held there by mistake. The Bush administration has warned that some of those being brought to the prison were so dangerous that they would "gnaw through the hydraulic lines" of their transport plane to bring it down. Yet 36 of them have been released as of the first week of June, including one who claimed to be 100 years old. The advocates say international law is quite clear. If there is doubt about a prisoner's status, the Geneva Convention requires that the prisoner gets a hearing before a competent tribunal.

Lawyers for the detainees charge that prison conditions there are horrendous. Stephen Kenny, lawyer for accused Australian Taliban fighter David Hicks, charged that prisoners at naval base were incarcerated in wire cages, had almost no exercise and were subject to "stress and duress" torture (a combination of sleep depravation and sensory overload).

The world does not know what's going on behind the prison walls at Guantanamo Bay, but the issue reflects the deplorable status of an institution that American patriots like myself want to see reformed: the prison system. Our prison system and our attitudes toward the incarcerated don't shine brightly on the ideals we profess as a nation. Further it doesn't make much sense for the federal and state governments to foolishly spend billions of dollars on the construction and maintenance of prisons while they come up short on their budgets and when the crime rate is falling.

The embarrassing fact for us true patriots: The execution of children, sub-human prison conditions, sexual abuse of women prisoners, the economic exploitation of prisoners, brutal incarceration of refugees are some of the human rights violations for which successive US presidential administrations regularly have taken the moral high ground and condemned other countries. But since the 1990s, much to our discomfort, critics have charged that, while we have set ourselves up as the self-proclaimed arbiter of the world's moral standards, we really have no business criticising other countries about the abysmal state of their prison systems while our own laws and criminal justice practices remain out of line with recognised international human rights standards.

Let's compare how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world on key prison issues.

Prison population: The numbers continue to rise globally, but nowhere more quickly than in the US. Human Rights Watch (HRW) puts the world inmate population at between eight and 10 million; the US is responsible for up to 25 per cent of the total. When compared to the global community, in fact, the US figures are starkly disproportionate to its population. Europe, for example, has a population of 330 million, but only about 300,000 prisoners; India, with a population four times that of the US, has about 500,000 prisoners.

In a report it released last June, The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that the prison population just keeps mushrooming. It rose to more than 2.1 million in 2002, a 2.6 percent increase even though other states showed a drop in the crime rate.

So, what accounts for the US's huge prison population? Unlike many other countries, most prisoners in the US are nonviolent offenders, meaning they're in jail for offences involving neither harm nor the threat of harm toward a victim. "Credit" the war on drugs for that state of affairs, because most of those in jail are there for possession, not sale, of narcotics. In fact, 77 per cent of the growth in the number of inmates from 1978 to 2000 involved nonviolent offences. Today, drug offenders now make up more than half of all federal prisoners. Yet, only about 27.6 per cent of male and 14.4 per cent of female inmates are violent offenders.

Death penalty: On this hot issue, the US is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. Between 1976 -- the year capital punishment was reinstated in the US -- and August 2001 more than 725 people were executed. According to surveys, the overall status of the death penalty by the year 2000 for 194 nations went this way: 76 nations were defined as completely abolitionist, 11 had abolished it for ordinary crimes, and 36 retained the death penalty but we're de facto abolitionists. This leaves only 71 death penalty countries.

During the past decade, the movement globally has clearly been toward the death penalty's abolition. The US is woefully out of step with the rest of the world on this issue. In an April 1997 resolution, the UN Commission on Human Rights called on all member states that have not yet abolished the death penalty to consider suspending executions, with the intent of abolishing them. Meanwhile, the European Union has made the abolition of capital punishment a precondition for membership.

And it's embarrassing the company we are keeping on this issue! The U.S. is the world's fourth ranked executioner, behind only China, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it's the only Western democracy that still puts prisoners to death.

As an American concerned about equal justice before the law, I oppose the death penalty for a simple reason: It reflects a policy toward prison inmates that is racist. African Americans are disproportionately put to death. We can see why when we look at some more recent statistics. About ten pent of all African males between age five and 29 were imprisoned in 2002, compared with just 1.2 per cent of the white males. Black men, moreover, account for 45 per cent of all inmates serving a sentence more than a year, and black men outnumber the white males even though African Americans make up just 12 per cent of the population.

Treatment of children: Prisoners in Iran are executed for adultery and sodomy; in China, Malaysia, the Congo and Nigeria, for armed robbery; in China and Vietnam for economic offences, including embezzlement and corruption by public officials.

And the US? Since 1997, it's the only country known to have executed inmates who committed crimes while under age 18. Five Muslim states -- Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia -- gave up killing children more than a decade ago. Today, the US and Somalia hold the dubious distinction of being the only countries not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of Children.

Prison conditions: Human Rights watch has reported that prison conditions, "while varying greatly from country to country and facility to facility, are shockingly low in most countries." Here, the US is neither an exception to the norm nor a part of the solution. In fact, the world's most vocal defender of human rights, has rubbed shoulders with China and the other usual suspects associated with the issue.

In May 2000, the UN rebuked the US for the "brutality" found in its prisons, the first time that's happened. The committee of ten independent experts that wrote the report urged the US to abolish such practices as the use of electro-shock stun belts and restraint chairs on uncooperative inmates, pointing out that they were a violation of the international convention against torture.

At about the same time, Amnesty International (AI) publicly criticised the US for its use of super-maximum security prisons in which "inmates are often locked up for twenty-three and a half hours a day. They eat and exercise alone, live under extreme levels of surveillance and control, and have little or no opportunity for education and vocational training."

AI described the US's "super max" prisons as "high tech cages," a term with a familiar ring, intentional or not. It sounds like "tiger cages," the term the US used to describe North Vietnamese prisons during the Vietnam War.

Another big problem worldwide is the continued reliance, even in the richest countries, on what HRW describes as "old, antiquated and physically decaying prison facilities." According to the group's investigations, "nineteenth century prisons needing constant upkeep remain in use in a number of countries, including the U.S., Russia, Italy, and the United Kingdom."

Even the U.S. can't afford to keep building more and more prisons to house the booming prison population. It's really nutty when you stop to consider that most those prisoners are non violent.

The cost of housing, feeding and caring for just one non-violent prisoner costs us about $ 20,000, according to the Sentencing Project, a non-profit organisation that promotes alternatives to prisons. Consider that the cost to the American taxpayer of one just prison cell is $100,000!

Prison labour: The world knows of the horror stories about China's prison labour system. The U.S. Congress and the media have constantly wagged a finger at China. But again, the US can't seize the moral high ground.

In both places, prisoners are forced to work or face the consequences. In Florida, for example, prisoners are required to make boots, licences, and other items. In a bit of sleazy irony, some products have been exported to Third World countries, such as Trinidad, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. Sure, US law bans the importing of prison-made goods and restricts their sale across state lines, but no federal law prohibits their export.

In the federal prison system, as well as many states, inmates are put to work specifically to save the taxpayer money. A prisoner who refuses can expect to be denied "privileges" or shut up in a super max facility. Is there a term other than "slave labour" to describe this arrangement?

Female prisoners: Human rights groups have documented the despicable sexual abuse against women in prisons worldwide. The US again has been in bad company. In May 2000, AI released a report documenting the cases of 1000 women who say they were sexually abused during their time in US prisons. "Our laws are woefully inadequate to protect women in US prisons, too many of whom are subject to sexual assault, harassment, and barbaric shackling practices," charged William Schultz, AI's US Executive Director.

The law is also not protecting the rights of the incarcerated at Guantanamo. The terror tribunal that are being put in place to prosecute the detainees contain such extraordinary restrictions on counsel that the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers has advised its member not to act as counsel for them.

I say it's not in the U.S.'s best interests to act in the War on Terrorism without the constraints of the law. Nor does it do anything for our image to sustain a prison system that leads us to be grouped with some of the worse human rights violators on the planet. Reform of the prison system and the other serious domestic problems plaguing our otherwise great country, not the pursuit of illegal and inane foreign wars, should be our priority.

Ron Chepesiuk is a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chittagong University.