Indeed. The entire situation around rape and sex in prison is appalling; I've recently gotten interested in stuff like women's health care and pregnancy and what happens to the children of prisoners. I'm not familiar with much of the theory on this kind of thing, but I sort of suspect that when you're talking about controlling someone's body in that way, it's pretty much a slippery slope to tactily or explicitly endorsing rape, giving birth in shackles, having your kids taken away, and all the rest of it.
This is the most bizarrely evil thing about our justice system.
IIRC tha National Guard troops at the Abu grahaib prison were Maryland prison guards back in the world, which may be one reason that they didn't blanche when the CIA asked them to soften up the prisoners. They did it erery day back home.
When we joke about prison rape, we have to remember something that has been relayed to me via a friend from a philosophy professor, succinctly stated:
We should send people to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
That is a seriously stupid letter Instapundit printed in the earlier post.
Graner was, certainly.
I remember coming to the realization--not so long ago, maybe a couple years--about just how sick it was that we treated this as a joke. You read about awful things like slavery, segregation, etc. and wonder how they were universally taken for granted, including by people we respect quite a lot in other contexts...More than the death penalty or prisoner treatment abroad or the war, this seems like one of those issues, where there's just a collective blindness.
I don't think wanting a more decent criminal justice system is as politically dangerous as it once was, either, between the drop in crime rates, things like the Innocence Project seeping into public consciousness, and terrorists becoming the new bogeyman.
My fantasy candidates reduce the prison population by ending the War on Drugs, and then keep enough of the money that could be saved by the reduction in the population to spend on making prisons secure and humane.
mine too. He also takes the right to counsel for indigent defendants seriously. But he otherwise resembles John Edwards or Barack Obama rather than Dennis Kucinich, which means he's probably going to remain in the realm of fantasy....
8. The War on (some) Drugs has got to be the biggest failure since Prohibition, and for the same reasons. Think how much tax revenue has been foregone by not havong legalized pot. I read somewhere that all the tobacco companies have tradmarks for MJ ciggies waiting for the day.
I'll add to LB's 8 by saying that we also seriously reconsider sentencing and the prison-as-primary-means-of-punishment model. Really, prison should be reserved for people who are actively dangerous to society. There are a lot of people in prison for shit that doesn't constitute a physical threat, and we ought to figure out some other way of dealing with property crimes and such like.
Oh, and not only counsel for the poor, but also *keeping prisoners in-state*. We're about to move a bunch of people as far away as Alabama, and all I can think of is, great, sucks for them and their families. Way to help preserve emotional support structures.
11: House arrest is vastly preferable to jail time for all sorts of nonviolent crimes.
To digress into the ressentiment angle, I always feel like there's a basic-and-not-always-willful misunderstanding on the part of MRAs about issues like this--feminists are actually the women the least likely to yuck it up about prison rape, and the least likely to support brutal prison conditions generally. We're also among the least likely--to borrow from the MRA comment posted--to think that TV shows with a dumb schlubby husband and a saintly wife are some kind of laugh riot.
I mean, I've met some MRA types, and I often feel that there's some genuine confusion going on--like they can't grasp that criticism of patriarchy isn't actually a vote for matriarchy--someone always has to be the loser in their worldview, and if it's not women, then it has to be men.
And consider that a lot of prisoners are shifted from prison to prison and state to state as punishment--they're on a bus for days, sometimes, and they can't call their lawyers or their families, and no one knows exactly where they are.
"My fantasy candidates reduce the prison population by ending the War on Drugs,"
It was exactly this wish that led me to think of myself as a Libertarian for a while. But then the internet came along and I found out they were all crazy.
Another terrible legacy of Bush is that he's fucked so many things up that it'll be years before we can be in a position to put the WOD back on the front burner.
IIRC tha National Guard troops at the Abu grahaib prison were Maryland prison guards back in the world, which may be one reason that they didn't blanche when the CIA asked them to soften up the prisoners. They did it erery day back home.
I've been told that Newjack is a good book about the prison system (told from the perspective of someone who took a job as a prison guard to write about it). My recollection of what I was told is that prison is hard problem, and it's not just a matter of "think of the incarcerated as people, not animals." But I haven't read it.
14: Yeah. I've gotten involved in conversations with men (online -- luckily I don't seem to run into these guys in person) who have a lot of bitterness against 'feminists', that turns out to be against women, to the extent that traditional gender roles benefit women to the detriment of men. And it's hard to get the conversation on any sane grounds, because they're pretty hateful regardless, which makes saying "No, no, you shouldn't hate feminists, we're trying to overturn the gender roles you despise," unattractive because it's an implicit endorsement of the hating women generally bit.
11: Prison came about as an alternative to physical punishment (stocks, flogging, etc) - it was intended to be rehabilitative rather than punitive. I sometimes wonder if everyone would be better off if the punishment for stealing a car wasn't five years in jail but some time on the wrong end of a taser.
It seems morally wrong, but when compared to the actual prison system rather than some ideal prison system, I really have to wonder.
Newjack is a great book. I think I've even mentioned it here. Haven't clicked the links yet, but in Newjack, he says tha prison rape was, in his experience, actually very rare.
5: Wow. I know Instapundit is a tool and all, but did he really say "this sort of systematic demeaning of men is well-entrenched in the culture, though people are starting to notice and complain" with a straight face? I weep.
19: Well, the organism is designed to learn from pain as well as pleasure, so if the Taser hit came close in time to the offense it should work better than the current system. Of course, practically anything would work better than the current system.
Of course, practically anything would work better than the current system.
I know my father, an old leftie, was right to say I have a conservative temperment because I instinctively disbelieve any such statement as this.
"The worst is not so long as we may say, 'This is the worst.'"
I really don't believe it either. In fact, I can always imagine worse, no matter what. Near as I can tell tho', the current justice/prison system violates almost everything ever learned about good &efficient learning and behavior mod.
Another great book is True Notebooks, about the writer's year teaching a writing workshop in Juvenile hall among boys awaiting their trials or sentencing for fairly violent crimes like murder--and with that, frequently, transfer to an adult prison.
It seems to me that the heart of the issue is that we see these prisoners as faceless evil people, typified by the glamorously monstrous prisoners like Dahmer; when you look at the actual spectrum of felonies that get sent to prison many of them are simply on the further end of humanity's fallibility. I'm the world's goodiest two shoes, but I find whatever tiny, positive brush I have with someone who seems like they might get sucked into the bad side of the criminal-justice vortex has done me good by reminding me that most crimes cannot possibly negate humanity. You'd think fears of wrongful punishment or the notion of "there but for the Grace of God go I" would be stronger in our culture.
Apostropher recently and somewhat randomly drew my attention to these verses from the Bible: Matthew 25:31-46 . While I am not Christian and believe only in everlasting life, not everlasting hell, I have to say these lines struck some small chord of awe even in me--and I'm a little surprised they do not strike deep chords of fear and provoke much scrambling activism among true believers:
36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? 38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? 39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? 40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.. . .4Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? 45Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 46And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
If this is issue is not the essence of ministering the least of us in prison, not sure what is.
Yeah, it could always be worse, but it's pretty bad in this country. I had some friends in high school who were in and out of jail; I can't say it did much good.
14: Well, most MRA types are still indulging in simple backlash as far as I can see. To the extent that there are honest intellectual confusions going on, they tend to be
a) a confusion about the distinction between pop-'feminism' (e.g. those vaguely-feminist elements discernible in pop culture), and those who identify as feminists in an ideological or activist sense; and
b) lacking a feel for what actually constitutes feminism, or an understanding of its various ideological subdivisions, so they will be prone to look at someone like Twisty (I'm sorry to always be beating on Twisty but she really does come to mind in this context) and mistake them for feminists-as-such.
MRAs are not the only ones confused about these sorts of things, and it doesn't help that there's a frequent tendency in intra-feminist polemics toward disavowing the feminist cred of one's opponent. But most of the pattern is still along the lines of LB's 18, in terms of dressing up fairly bog-standard resentments of women in "activist" language.
"feminists-as-such" is wrong, s/b "feminists-as-a-whole"
20
I am also under the impression that prison rape is not actually as prevalent as popularly thought.
There's a lot of room between 'not everyone gets raped' and 'there's an intolerable amount of rape'. I'd believe, without having seen reliable studies, that it's perfectly possible, including more likely than not, to make it through a prison sentence without being raped -- that doesn't mean that there isn't a grotesquely high incidence of it.
29: I think there are four different statistics at play here. (1)There is how frequently people joke about prison rape--i.e. how often it is mentioned in pop culture. One might take this is a metric of how common people think it is, but really, it isn't. (2) There is how often Americans think prison rape occurs. I.e. you survey the population, you tell them how many male prisoners there are in non-solitary, and you ask them to tell you how frequently they seriously, sincerely think there are rapes. (3) You survey the population and you ask "what do you honestly think is the probability that a given male prisoner will be raped?" (4) There's the upper and lower bound on how many rapes there actually are, necessarily a range.
I distinguish between 2&3 because people often don't have a good sense of scale and rate/frequency; the official statistics alluded to by #2 would count the rapes and intuitive statistic alluded to in #3 would count the rape victims.
My intuitive sense is that that while there maybe a large positive discrepancy between (1) and (4), there is probably quite a negative discrepency between (2)/(3) and (4).
And obviously, valued for its qualitative perspective as it may be, no subjective memoir can discount (4).
From the articles Ezra cites, reasonable estimates range from 10-20% of male inmates. I'm sure it varies wildly between institutions and institution-types.
The prison rape elimination act mandated the collection of statistics. Here is a press release:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/svrca04pr.htm
The figures are lower than expected and are somewhat controversial.
reasonable estimates range from 10-20% of male inmates
See, I'm going on memory here, but what Conover says isn't compatible with numbers that high. Let me see if I can find the book and whether it has an index (dont' think it does). Of course, it's also possible that the guards are so negligent that they honestly don't know about a lot of the rapes, but that doesn't seem so likely.
Or, as joeo's stats seem to say, the guards are responsible for most of the rapes...
34: Doesn't seem terribly unlikely to me -- particularly doesn't seem unlikely that someone with a short career (only a year) in corrections might not be clued in to everything that was happening.
33: Don't those figures rely on incidents having been reported and investigated? It's my understanding that male inmates are highly likely to be intimidated or humiliated into not reporting.
I've seen Cindy Struckman-Johnson cited in support of the 20% figure but I have no idea what the methodology of the study was.
Part of an interview with Conover.
SERWER: Ws that actually things may not be quite as bad as people are led to believe in prison in terms of violence. That you said there wasn't rampant rape and violence against prisoners going on. Is that, in fact, the case?
CONOVER: Every prison is different. There are prisons where rape occurs. It sounds like Abu Ghraib was one of them. And, you know, human rights groups come up with credible reports of this, but it's not like in the movies where this goes on every day. I mean, at Sing Sing, I was looking for this because I'm a reporter, above all, and a journalist, and I thought, this is what my friends are going to want to know about. It's seldom seemed to happen there. You know, in the movies, there's always a hidden stairwell or a broom closet where the white guy, I'm not sure why it's always the white guy, there aren't so many of them in an actual maximum security prison, but it's always the white guy who gets it. In reality, I don't think that's the case. Now, that's not to say prison isn't in its very nature a brutal place. Prisons are coercive, as a guard you have to be willing to use force against people who don't obey the rules and so, yes, it's a physical job, but, no, brutality is not the order of the day. And, no, in a well-run prison, these kinds of things never happen.
Of course, Conover is accused of being too sympathetic to guards and of "whitewashing." Dunno. It actually seems kind of irrelevant what the numbers are--even prisoners should have physical security which should keep them from being raped, but also from being beaten or stabbed, which is far more common.
What on earth about the Massachusetts Restaurant Association would dispose its members to expressions of misogyny?
Wait, I thought we were talking about the Manitoba Restaurant Association.
You're both wrong; we're obviously talking about the Mountain Rescue Association. They save hikers, but not the female hikers.
39
Of course it matters what the numbers are, society has limited resources and should fix the biggest problems first. It is true that some prison improvements just require a commitment from the top to try to keep prisons reasonably safe.
Of course it matters what the numbers are
I just mean that it doesn't much matter what the rape numbers are, when the fact that prisoners don't have physical safety more generally doesn't seem to be in dispute.
but in Newjack, he says tha prison rape was, in his experience, actually very rare.
Had an acquaintance a couple of jobs ago that had done some time. He talked about it a bit, and it sounded much like Conover's description. That while it was no means impossible, it was less than you'd assume from media portrayals. Also said people in prison are a lot more polite than you'd expect, and that most people in there deliberately avoid conflict.
Incidentally, if you've ever been in prison, or know someone who has, it was real apparent from the get go that James Frey had never gone anywhere near one.
44
According to this inmates in general are less likely to be killed in prison than they would be out of prison.
Maligne Rafting Adventures. No chicks, because they interfere with the overall malignancy of the experience.
I think I went on one of those rafting trips once. Maybe it was a different company; there were chicks.
I have heard rumours that there is a Benign Rafting Association, but the path to them is strait and narrow, and unwary young rafters are all too easily seduced into the Malign side of rafting.
42 - Do they fuck the shit out of bears?
I have heard rumours that there is a Benign Rafting Association
I'm told they're very supportive.
(Okay, that's awful. I ban myself.)
There's no generalization about prison rape. The difference between the worst state prison and the best is enormous. By and large the federal prisons are the best of all.
There's a hierarchy of risk, with isolated individuals (without influential friends either on the inside or on the outside) being the main victims.
Rape always happens with the knowledge and effective consent of staff. Rape can be considered to be part of the punishment, or just as a sadistic joke, or else as just too much trouble to do anything about.
The overall statistics aren't important, because locally the problem can be horriifc.
The "river rafting" thing links back to the subject of the thread via "Deliverance", of course.
The other thing--and Insty's comment highlights it, and I was trying to point it out in my first comment--is that prison rape doesn't only happen to men. But usually when people are being concerned about it, they're thinking men raping other men. It's worth keeping in mind that women prisoners are also sexually abused.
Do they fuck the shit out of bears?
Gotta do something between rescues.
a naive question re 57: are women prisoners more likely to be sexually abused by male guards, or by other female prisoners?
Not an expert, but I *think* guards.
8. The War on (some) Drugs has got to be the biggest failure since Prohibition, and for the same reasons. Think how much tax revenue has been foregone by not havong legalized pot. I read somewhere that all the tobacco companies have tradmarks for MJ ciggies waiting for the day.
You'd think there would by lobbyist money vs. WOD in this case.