Anyone who looks at the problem can’t react with anything other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over 60,000 prisoners — the great bulk of them male — fall victim to sexual abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are “punks” who are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on end.
The federal report’s conclusions — a zero-tolerance policy, more direct monitoring, and the like — almost are all common sense. State, local, and federal governments should take immediate legislative and administrative action to implement nearly everything in the report. (Most of the practices are already commonplace in the federal and better-run state systems.) Although giving trial lawyers more business rarely makes sense, Congress may also want to reconsider laws that make it very difficult for prisoners to sue prison authorities absent concrete evidence of physical harm. It’s quite possible that many legitimate prison-rape claims get thrown out of court under current laws. And prison rape needs to stop.
But the nation’s prison-rape problems can’t go away overnight for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly. Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in prison has lead to a widespread attitude that’s frankly inhumane. It is one thing to say that prison shouldn’t be fun and quite another to say that detainees “deserve” rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.
Government runs the prisons and, in the end, government policy will have to play the dominant role in eliminating prison rape. But, to facilitate that, society also has to change and acknowledge that, even though most people in prison have done awful things, they’re still human beings and still have rights.
Seconded.
I am slightly suspicious of certain conservatives' motives for being concerned about the prison rape issue. Among many, it seems to come at least partly from gay panic (having sex with another dude is worst thing ever!!!), which manifests in acceptance of non-sexual assaults and of sexual assaults on female prisoners, and framing all prison sex as rape.
ReplyDeleteA few conservatives also seem to frame the issue in racial terms; I wasn't quite sure what Lehrer meant by "the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly."
Still, props to Lehrer for recognizing that in the drive to reduce prison litigation, courts have wrongfully turned their backs on prisoners who suffer heinous abuse that prison officials ignore or even encourage. And also for writing about this for years: see, e.g., Eli Lehrer, Hell Behind Bars: The Crime that Dare Not Speak Its Name, NATIONAL REVIEW, Feb. 5, 2001, at 24; Eli Lehrer, No Joke: Prison Rape Is Finally Taken Seriously, NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, June 20, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/commentlehrer062002.asp.
THe US just needs prison reform generally, so it doesn't follow that jokes are what's preventing one aspect of said reform.
ReplyDeleteThe *real* reason there's no reform is because there's no real constituency that cares a lot about it (at least, not one with voting rights) so it's hard to get critical mass among politicians when you can't appeal to self-interest. Oh, and I strongly suspect given the amount of money involved that plenty of companies have a profit motive to lobby against reform.
So yeah, I'd say that's more important than jokes.