JUST IMAGINE, for a minute, what would have happened if there weren't any photos or videos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The press might have reported some "allegations" of prisoner abuse, and a few more aggressive reporters might have quoted a few eyewitnesses describing grisly scenes. But the Pentagon would have denied it, any official investigation would have been cloaked in greatly tempered language, and in a few days, the Bush administration would have been able to dismiss the whole thing as a bunch of unfounded charges by malcontents who might be associated with al-Qaeda, repeated by liberal whiners who opposed the war on terrorism.

It's exactly the same thing that would have happened if nobody had happened to videotape the beating of Rodney King. Or if Linda Vaccarezza tried to accuse the San Francisco police of misconduct in breaking her arm but didn't have a video to prove it. And it's a clear case for ending the ban on media access to prisoners in California.

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What happened at Abu Ghraib is, of course, horrifying, and the story gets worse almost every day, as more photos of abuse become public. The widespread pattern of dehumanizing torture can't possibly have been entirely the work of a handful of low-ranking soldiers – this sort of behavior was clearly condoned, if not ordered, from on high, and if the investigation and courts-martial ultimately don't include senior military officers, the United States will continue to lose credibility on the world stage.

In fact, as Pratap Chatterjee and A.C. Thompson report on page 19, there's considerable evidence that private defense contractors, who are immune from prosecution under military codes, may have played a significant role in the torture. That ought to be a big part of the final inquiry into this nightmare – and it makes a strong case to end the Bush administration's practice of privatizing the U.S. military (see "Soldiers of Fortune," 5/1/02).

But there's another element to this story that needs to be told. If President Bush really wants to argue that the abuse of prisoners is "un-American," then he needs to look back home, at the prison system in the United States. Because dehumanizing treatment, and even outright torture, is a part of life in countless U.S. prisons – and because there are rarely photos, and inmates have little credibility or access to legal help or media attention, the public knows little about it.

As Joe Loya reports on page 18, a 1996 videotape in Bush's home state of Texas shows prison guards forcing naked inmates to crawl on their bellies while they were beaten with sticks and bitten by dogs. In 1997, guards from Corcoran State Prison in California were charged with staging gladiator-style battles between inmates, then shooting and killing some of them. The list goes on and on – and these are only the very few incidents that we know about.

In California, the prison system has become a $5.7 billion-a-year monstrosity, with more than 300,000 people locked behind bars – and a climate that almost ensures abuse. The prison guards union has immense political power, and there's almost no civilian oversight. Most important, perhaps, the state government has systematically blocked news media access to state prisons. That's a guarantee that horrible problems will occur, and nobody will ever find out.