I hate reading articles like this. I'm always left feeling so upset and so fucking powerless to do anything at all about it. Everything in this article is 100% in accord with my priors--nothing in the article was a shock and my expectation is that investigations of prison system in any state would turn up plenty of similar stories. (My wife used to work as a prison psychologist in MA and she has plenty of truly horrible stories.) Correctional officers and the culture surrounding their work/relative power of the populations they interact with/structure and characteristics of the job basically all are the same dynamics that are in play in police work in situations most likely to lead to police abuses, except with all the aggravating factors multiplied by 10.
I rarely answer Rowan's calls because they're so expensive and depressing and I can't give him what he needs. This sort of makes me want to.