This is an extremely damaging myth and it needs to die. Prison conditions in the US are, by and large, deplorable. Worse than anywhere in Europe. Worse than most of Latin America. We look like Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

>Examples of mistreatment claimed include prisoners left naked and exposed in harsh weather or cold air;[120] "routine" use of rubber bullets[121] and pepper spray;,[120][121][121] solitary confinement of violent prisoners in soundproofed cells for 23 or 24 hours a day;[120][122] and a range of injuries from serious injury to fatal gunshot wounds, with force at one California prison "often vastly disproportionate to the actual need or risk that prison staff faced."[121] Such behaviors are illegal, and, "Professional standards clearly limit staff use of force to that which is necessary to control prisoner disorder."[121]

>Human Rights Watch raised concerns with prisoner rape and medical care for inmates.[123] In a survey of 1,788 male inmates in Midwestern prisons by Prison Journal, about 21% claimed they had been coerced or pressured into sexual activity during their incarceration and 7% claimed that they had been raped in their current facility.[124] Tolerance of serious sexual abuse and rape in United States prisons are consistently reported as widespread.[citation needed] It has been fought against by organizations such as Stop Prisoner Rape.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confine...

>He's right about that. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and I were held in Evin Prison's isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Josh and I for 26 months. We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn't go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was "confidential."

>What I want to tell Acosta is that no part of my experience—not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners—was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded, and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody?

>I want to answer his question—of course my experience was different from those of the men at California's Pelican Bay State Prison—but I'm not sure how to do it. How do you compare, when the difference between one person's stability and another's insanity is found in tiny details? Do I point out that I had a mattress, and they have thin pieces of foam; that the concrete open-air cell I exercised in was twice the size of the "dog run" at Pelican Bay, which is about 16 by 25 feet; that I got 15 minutes of phone calls in 26 months, and they get none; that I couldn't write letters, but they can; that we could only talk to nearby prisoners in secret, but they can shout to each other without being punished; that unlike where I was imprisoned, whoever lives here has to shit at the front of his cell, in view of the guards?

It is a crazy, awful, and unnecessary black mark on America's human rights record. There is no excuse for this sort of thing, and it happens every day. Other first-world countries get along fine without systematic mistreatment of nearly eight people in a thousand.