prison rape

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If you asked me what issue Americans will see in retrospect as the greatest unacknowledged barbarity of our time, I would nominate prison rape, which is not only tolerated but frequently encouraged within our prisons and is still the subject of jokes in popular culture and politics.

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Ezra Klein wrote a series of posts on Prison Rape that are really worth reading. As it happens, my roommates were busy cracking jokes about prison rape while I was reading them, and I kind of flew off at them. Accuse me of having no sense of humor, if you will (and they did), but when the conceptualization of a problem as a popular joke is one of the key barriers to fixing it, I don’t think it’s a neutral action to play right into that structure…

But wtf mickey, this comes off as some token political thing you've posted to seem sympathetic.

mainly because he refused to sell out his coworkers and didnt take a plea. which i respect him for a lot.

http://www.deathrowrecords.com/images/covers_s/bone_thugs_war_is_on_L_T.gif

http://ourworld.cs.com/msrocks01/glitter_pinups_myway/msmw002.gif

all of them
-- hm (mi...), February 14th, 2007. (modestmickey) (link)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

but try a little tenderness yourself. suicide jokes = not funny.

i mean., you aren't in prison or anything.

Particularly if you factor in (or out) that a portion of the remainder would be the perpretrators.

the only way to do this is to ban him.

i think this implication is what is given the least thought. how can society reasonably expect anybody to be 'rehabilitated' in prison after traversing such horrendous circumstances? prison culture leads to a more violent, criminal society. EVERYBODY loses, and for some reason it's still a funny seinfeld joke.

Good Frontline shows about US prisons: The New Asylums and Angel on Death Row. Their whole criminal justice series is pretty eye opening.

An Atlantic Article about the US Prison Industrial Complex

It's terrifying.

Or, you know, if they won't let them vote after they get out?

i think prison rape needs to be addressed and radically changed in popular culture before it even has a possibility of being addressed in the political sphere.

But we can all at least agree that it's a terrible thing. And probably that the first step in any solution is awareness of it as an actual problem. I agree w/ Mickey that moving it to the "not okay to make jokes about" list is a good start.

Well, Jeffrey Archer was all against prison reform until he was an inmate, and then he was all for it.

Well, that's the question. Because I could ask where the impetus for cultural change will come from if the people who are responsible for the actual care of prisoners don't take that responsibility seriously. The two things go hand in hand.

I read a journal article recently that suggested that international pressure could be the answer, but the U.S. doesn't listen to international pressure, so all that can be hoped for is that some politician will make a crusade of it and start the ball rolling.

This is pretty OTM. Most voters would bring back flogging; the future is certainly not in the proles.

-- Mr. Que (pelagi...), February 14th, 2007. (Party with me Punker)

that's kind of like taking the position "and how do we successfully end the iraq war? if you can't figure it out, i guess we have no choice but to stay and do the exact same thing!" as citizens, i don't think it is our position to figure out the solution. that is what our government is for. we need to recognize the urgency and monstrosity of the situation and give them impetus for change.

but here's a few suggestions. first, address prison overcrowding. they're simply too few. there's two parts of that. first, we need more and larger prisons, and second, we need to not be throwing people in prison who have no business being there. american society at large truly doesn't understand the extant of that second part. and then, why not have a lot more oversight of prison administration? from what it sounds like to me, the guards and what they do is largely up to their own doing. there's very little accountability.

as it stands right now, i believe that prison culture perpetuates criminal culture. somebody who is imprisoned is much more likely to be a repeat, and worse, offender, than had they not gone through the prison system of institutionalized rape. so, we've created a giant snowball rolling down a mountain. how we stop the rapid growth will be a huge problem, but the first step is addressing that it must be done. right now, even that is miles away.

owl.jpg

DRUG WAR ETC

-- Mr. Que (pelagi...), February 14th, 2007. (Party with me Punker)

this is exactly what i'm thinking about.

to draw a parallel with my daily experience, i don't send unruly students to the principal's office to "rehabilitate" them, i do it to protect the rest of the class from the consequences of their behavior.

for a lot of students, honestly, it's easier (and less humiliating) to be getting beat up by the headmaster than getting beat up by math or science lessons.

is my parallel clear?

I also disagree with the idea that "the proles" wouldn't support prison reform aimed at eliminating rape. I suspect that the majority of voters would support such reform, so long as the issue was framed properly. I admit that the distance between here and there is vast. Still, if the citizen activists who pushed for civil rights reform in the 40s and 50s had been deterred by the seeming impossibility of the task, or if they had waited for altruistic politicians to do the heavy lifting, then we might still have colored drinking fountains in Selma.

American prisons will continue to be a sickening national shame only as long as "we the people" continue to stand for it.

***

"there are things about going to prison that are WAY WORSE than being raped."
-- bell labs

??? Please to explain.

these things would be way worse than rape.

Frequent, brutal, AIDS-loaded anal rape + getting to do what you want + getting to see friends & fam = bad.

No rape + imprisonment + no friends & fam = bad.

I think any attempt to portray one of these as "WAY WORSE" than the other is kinda silly. Bad = bad.

but, it's not at the top of the list of things that worry me, my family, or my father, who is going to jail. maybe this is because he will most likely end up in a medium or min security federal prison where it's not much of a problem, but, i don't know, he's much sadder about the fact that he will probably be in his 70s when he gets out and have missed a big chunk of his life.

My two-part solution:

1. Emprisonment should not be punitive, but pragmatic. Only incarcerate people who pose a real danger to society. A mere handful would require incarceration, which would be lifelong, of course, unless a remedy was found for their dangerousness. Prison should be comfortable. Unkindness, even to intractable child-molesters, is unnecessary and corrosive to the morale of society.

2. Hire police and corrections officers by lottery, the way we appoint citizens for jury duty. A two year term of service?
Anyone who WANTS to carry a gun and boss others around IS AUTOMATICALLY DISQUALIFIED.

THERE. WHEN I AM QUEEN THAT IS HOW IT SHALL BE.

that's terrible, i'm really sorry.

rape in prisons shouldn't happen, rape outside of prisons shouldn't happen, etc. i'm not opposed to anyone championing this as their cause, i just think things like there are other things to talk about reforming first (i.e. mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent criminals)

Back to runningthe world:

ALSO, forget about the "problem" of gays inthe military. THE MILITARY SHOULD BE ALL DRAG QUEENS.
I also have a really great idea about power plants that would be run by stationary-bicycles, pedaled by addicts. To get a dose of their drug/drink of choice, they need only pedal. They would live there. It would be a comfy place.
THERE!!!!
TERRIBLE PROBLEM OF ADDICTION SOLVED
ALSO TERRIBLE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN OIL, NUKE PLANTS, ETC ETC.

This is how I pass my insomniac hours.

I don't think it has to be an either/or situation. Those things all go together.

ILE can still sometimes surprise you.

OTM.

And weird. I've been saying this - in more-or-less exactly those words - for years. The whole problem with cops & copping is that the attraction-points for the job (unquestioned authority, ability to cause fear in others, gun carrying, supertuff macho/hetero image, permission to use threats & even violence) pretty much guarantee that most people who will want the job shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it.

But as true as that might seem, it's too simplistic. Law enforment officers sometimes need to to communicate threat (a willingness to do real harm) in order to overcome the belligerence of others without actually resorting to violence. And unfortunately, the best way to communicate threat is to be legitimately threatening - i.e., cops have to mean it when they get tough. Therefore, there's a legitimate need for a "thuggish" tendency in certain police officers. Catch-22.

How do you balance the need for genuinely threatening cops (as a violence deterrent) with the simple fact that most genuinely threatening people can't be trusted to montitor and control their own behavior?

That doesn't even begin to speak to the mentally unwell or mentally incompetent. Yes, having a system of asylums tended toward the "One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest" complex, but many people who would have been there are now either medicated, in jail, or on the street. If you don't have money or the right background, one of the latter two. Finding someone mentally incompetent is seen as letting them off easy, which is ridiculous since being sent to a mental health facility tends on average to result in longer stays than most jail sentences, and it's a form of rehabilitation.

So encapsulating it with "prison rape is bad, huh" and drawing attention by highlighting the anal rape accounts diverts from the real issue -- prisons aren't making anything better, they're just getting more full and destroying lives. Sometimes through inmate-on-inmate violence, sometimes just because it's the wrong place to send people.

(I thieved from you ;___;)

-- bell labs (lindsay...), February 14th, 2007. (bell_labs)

maybe you and i are talking about different things, but the supreme court just recently deemed unconstitutional the mandatory sentencing guidelines. it happened about 6 months before my date. had it not, i was pretty much surely destined for prison. i don't want to make this thread about me, but damn, that fact still astounds me.

a proposed bill in washington state to basically test for HIV in prisons.

here's some wa state conservative blog that is outraged by these "felon friendly" bills by democrats:
http://soundpolitics.com/archives/007997.html

Baldock says he faces an uphill battle in trying to win a conviction against Francis. He's certain many jurors seated before him this week will wonder why they should even care what happens to prison inmates.