• Two lawsuits describe a system so perverse that two young men -- one an 18-year-old, 125-pound high-school senior arrested for speeding and evading police, the other a mentally disabled 24-year-old with a history of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest -- were thrown in cells with hardened criminals and raped. As the younger of the two was being put in cell 101 with a group known as "The Aryan Brotherhood," jailers told the men already there to teach the 18-year-old -- "fresh meat" -- a lesson he wouldn't forget.

• And there's the suit filed by Billy Jo Killion, a burglar who returned almost all that he had stolen to his victims and offered his apologies -- then did his time for the crime. When Jonathan Wells, his public defender, came to see him on Jan. 15, he found his client in a sorry state from a beating by fellow inmates four days earlier.

"The orbit of his right eye was basically crushed," Wells recalled last week. "His eyeball was like an 8-ball in his head. It was black, nasty: I could see no pupil, no retina, no iris ... He was beaten up very badly, worse than anyone I've ever seen before. "He was shaking like a wet and beaten cat." Yet the jailers shrugged off Killion's condition, telling Wells that the inmate was "milking his condition."

Officials say the inmates are making stuff up. A prison brutality experts says not necessarily so.

The pattern of the allegations -- assaults in the evening, for instance, after civilian jail workers have left -- fits, as do the nature of the assaults and the fact that the jail has a near-100 percent turnover in its 50-member staff each year. In 2000, the jail grew from 28 beds to 304 -- a $7 million expansion officials are financing by charging Pendleton County and state and federal governments for housing their prisoners.

The F.B.I. is investigating the charges.