Adam Gopnik's piece on The Caging of America does a good job explaining what's going on and summing up my feelings on the topic:
"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."
I remember reading that piece when it came out. I've never made a prison rape joke since, and I always am willing to be the person who makes an uncomfortable pause to hose down someone prison rape joke. Racist and gay hatreds found their support in 'harmless' jokes, and for that to change, the jokes had to change. People still tell prison rape jokes (and include in plotlines) where they would never use a racist or homophobic joke.
So the best way forwards to work against the prison rape meme is to be that person who says 'well, I don't find jokes about rape funny at all.' You'll get rolled eyes and mutterings behind your back, but people will look back at this period and wonder why this was such a big public joke instead of a terrible injustice.
To better picture the severity of that normalisation, just reverse the genders and imagine a TV show where a male inspector threatens a female suspect with prison rape...
American prisons are a disgrace and a national shame, and prison rapes are one of the most viscerally appalling reminders of that.
These statistics are likely misleading, though: it only includes the 9k or so cases that jail administrators reported. That's likely at least an order of magnitude less than happen in reality, and it's likely that the small minority that are actually reported by administrators have special aspects of them that make them highly non-representative of all sexual violence in prisons. They've passed through (at least) three filters already, for instance: the prisoner deciding to report it at all; the guard reported to seeing fit to report it to higher ups; and the higher ups deciding to report it to the overseeing agency.
Not sure which direction that'd go in, for the record, but it's worth keeping in mind while parsing this report.
It seems that a majority of these cases were actually consensual, not assault:
>Among the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases in 2011, 54 percent were committed by women, the report said. From 2009 to 2011, 84 percent of the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases involved a sexual relationship with a female staff member that “appeared to be willing,” compared to 37 percent of the cases involving male staff members during the same time period.
Those numbers imply that overall, 62% of substantiated staff-on-inmate cases were actually consensual. The headline seems inaccurate given that.
Of course, there are extreme sampling bias issues with this data. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it at all.
There is a new Netflix series out called "Orange is the New Black" based on a true life story of a woman who gets sent to prison for being a drug mule for her lesbian lover and only gets caught many years later when she is leading a normal suburban life.
At any rate, one of the plot lines is about a relationship between a prison guard and one of the female inmates. It comes up in the course of events that basically any relations between a guard and a prison inmate are considered rape because you can't consent when you are in prison to someone who has power over you. Sort of how a minor can't consent even when another minor is involved. Apparently it is illegal under any circumstance between a guard and inmate as a matter of law in all 50 states as of 2006.
To my knowledge, it is generally true that sexual contact between an inmate and a prison guard is legally rape no matter whether consensual or not.
This is a kludge in the law; obviously, female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense, and neither are the prisoners (who are the notional victims).
However... we definitely do want to criminalize that conduct, and should be punishing it much more than we actually do; those guards are not on our side; they are on the criminal's side and routinely compromise the security of the prison.
There's some small bit of gray area here, but I think most of those situations should still qualify as rape.
Prison guards have immense power over inmates. Their decisions can give a prisoner a plush gig or a terrible one; can allow for the prisoner to receive medical care or not; can result in a prisoner being punished severely for an infraction or escape with just a slap on the wrist or even nothing at all. The discretion of prison guards can even determine whether a prisoner will have the opportunity to be raped by another prisoner or not, or determine whether the prisoner ends up the sexual property of a nice owner or a brutal one.
In those circumstances, it's incredibly problematic to say that the prisoner had free choice in the matter: it's akin to asking a woman to have sex with you and at the same time off-handedly mentioning how unfortunate it'd be if she made you angry. It's a choice without a real choice.
The idea that men cannot be raped while being the penetrator is one that has to go.
Did you read the article I linked? It talks about a prisoner who impregnated four of his guards, who then bragged to each other about having his kids. How one of the guards went to the guy for moral support when she found the prison environment too disturbing to handle. How the prisoners passed around tips on seducing the guards. These were not guards with any power over the inmates.
Guards don't necessarily have the power you imagine. They are vastly outnumbered by the prisoners for one, and it's not uncommon for a guard to be intimidated into running drugs or other contraband for prison gangs. In many prisons housing violent offenders, its probably more accurate to say that the prisoners and the guards work in a tense sort of truce most of the time.
Power is situational: in one context someone might have power over the other, while in another a minute later the roles might switch. And yeah, people do form a sort of truce or understanding about how power is to be applied and when.
But when it comes down to it, guards have the power to use legitimated state violence on pretty much any offender. Simply because that might be politically costly (with respect to prisoner-guard relations) doesn't change the fact that the power exists and is real.
> female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense
Wrong person being raped. It's always the guard doing the 'raping' because of the power at play. Even if the prisoner consents, it may have been under a lot of pressure to avoid problems with the guard later.
OK, well, lets twist this around into a form you'll understand.
Do you accept that there could be no valid consensual love between master and slave in the deep south in the height of the slave trade? Do you accept that if such a "love" happened, it would be so clearly tainted by unequal power, the fear of reprisals, the hope for respite and status, that it would be a mockery even if both parties honestly felt it?
For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, it feels redundant to say this, but...
Did you read the article I linked? It talks about a prisoner who impregnated four of his guards, who then bragged to each other about having his kids. How one of the guards went to the guy for moral support when she found the prison environment too disturbing to handle. How the prisoners passed around tips on seducing the guards. These were not guards with any power over the inmates.
The power dynamic we're talking about is one where the prisoners hold power over the guards, not the other way around.
> Do you accept that there could be no valid consensual love between master and slave in the deep south in the height of the slave trade?
Of course not, no more than I accept that there can be no valid consensual love between a rich guy and his poor mistress. Which of the things you mention as making a "mockery" of master-slave relationships doesn't apply?
Well, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, so I'll just list some random quotes from the article.
> With the ease of ordering takeout, White used a smuggled cellphone to arrange exchanges between outside drug dealers and corrections officers, who brought the contraband to him to be sold inside the jail at huge markups, the affidavit alleged. Percocet went for $30 a pill; one-gram bags of marijuana sold for $50. The gang’s control was so complete that any non-member who tried to get in on the action had to pay a tax or risk physical harm.
> Thirteen of them [the female prison guards] allegedly smuggled cellphones and drugs inside their hair, lunches and underwear for the man they called “Bulldog” or “Tay.” One tattooed his name on her neck, another on her wrist. Four have carried his children.
> Documents that investigators recovered from the Black Guerrilla Family detail how its new members are taught to target specific officers. Look for women, they are told, with “low self-esteem, insecurities, and certain physical attributes.”
> Jon Galley, a top Maryland corrections official, said he likes to show trainees a copy of a how-to guide, confiscated from an inmate’s cell, that lays out how to win over guards. The two pages of tips include dropping a “kite,” or love note, confessing to the officer that the inmate “felt a connection to her, that she was beautiful.”
> officials would “turn a blind eye to contraband smuggling and actively protect White and the [Black Guerilla Family] by warning them of investigations,” according to the affidavit. One such warning allegedly came from Tiffany Linder, who had worked at Wal-Mart and Panera, her uncle said, before she was hired to be a guard three years ago. Investigators say the pregnant guard alerted White in January that cells were going to be searched.
> In one taped conversation, White boasted that he made $15,800 that month, less than normal. “This is my jail. You understand that?” he said to a friend. “I’m dead serious. . . . I make every final call in this jail. . . . Everything come to me.”
You seem dead set on saying "Well, guards exchanged other perks for the sex, therefore it wasn't rape!"
Which entirely misunderstands what rape is. It's about consent, or lack thereof. Would the guards have been in a position to have sex with him if not for the position of power they were placed in over him? No. Simply because he adopted very successful survival tactics to leverage the sex they were exacting from him doesn't change the fact he had no real ability to consent.
It does move toward a bit of a gray area here, because of possible pressure gangs exerted outside the prison. But that makes it even more rapey--if pressure were really being exerted in that way, both people involved were victims of sexual violence. This kind of sexual relationship is not something to glorify or excuse, and the implicit "go for it dude!" shows a great lack of empathy for his situation.
> Simply because he adopted very successful survival tactics to leverage the sex they were exacting from him doesn't change the fact he had no real ability to consent.
This idea is not compatible with White's own opinion of his situation, "I make every final call in this jail". Have we come to the point where third parties decide for you whether you consented to something?
> This kind of sexual relationship is not something to glorify or excuse,
Did you miss the part where I said it should be criminal, and called for it to be punished more severely than it already is? (The current level is basically a slap on the wrist.)
> and the implicit "go for it dude!" shows a great lack of empathy for his situation.
Undisputed master of an extensive domain, making upwards of $16K / month tax free, with an extensive harem, and immune to prosecution (he's already in jail!). I'm pretty sure he doesn't need much empathy.
The guards weren't extorting sex from the prisoners. The prisoners were seducing guards in order to get perks. (Similarly, if a girl assumes I'm rich, sleeps with me in the hope that I'll buy her some nice things, and I later do, that doesn't mean I was raped. And if I offer a girl something to sleep with me, and she accepts -- that doesn't mean she was raped. What was going on in that prison was analogous to the first girl, and your erroneous notion is analogous to the second.) The agency distinction is important, and we don't just have to assume the prisoners were the agents because they're the men... we have their direct word that that's what they were doing! We have (and I mentioned this) gang literature on how to effectively seduce guards! We have Tavon White's own word that he controls everything that happens in the jail! There's no conceivable way for him to be coerced into sex, or, really, anything, in the middle of his own thoroughly subverted jail.
Being well-off (supposedly, at least) and having power in certain domains does not mean you can't be raped. The only relevant attribute is consent. If you were making an argument that the prisoner actually had power over the guards through external contacts and implicit threats to their families, that'd be one thing. But you continually mistake masculine bravado and some level of material comfort for ability to consent. It's a category error.
Your analogies both fall flat, because there's the key point that the women and men in that situation have the ability to consent. The proper analogy is a kid who's been abducted by a pedophile. No matter how happy the kid is, no matter how kindly the pedophile treats the kid, no matter how many gifts the pedophile gives the kid, no matter how much the kid jockeys with other kids for the pedophile's affection--it's rape. Because consent.
The guards here are not asking the prisoners for sex. The prisoners are asking the guards for sex. If I ask you to do something, and you do, I have consented to that thing.
If I show a woman a gun, and tell her "sleep with me or I kill you", and she sleeps with me -- that's rape.
If I'm her boss, and tell her "sleep with me or you're fired", and she does -- that's not rape.
Of those two, the prison guard / prisoner relationship can be reasonably analogized to the gun scenario. But:
If I have a gun, and a woman sees it, swoons, and asks to sleep with me -- that's not rape.
That's what's actually going on. It's not rape unless I actually use (or threaten to use) my ability to coerce.
By focusing so much on the idea that a prison guard could hypothetically have power over inmates, you're worrying about the appearance of impropriety. But while that is present in this case, there is no actual impropriety occurring (toward the prisoners).
The guard who extorts sex from a prisoner they've taken a fancy to is abusing the prisoner. That's not happening here. The guard who caves to an inmate's seduction and does them favors out of love is not abusing the prisoner. They're abusing the trust society placed in them when they were made a prison guard.
Consent is meaning yes. It may or may not be measurable. If there are pressures that mean a person has good reasons to say yes when they do not mean yes, then it is not measurable. Consent that can't be measured must be assumed to be absent.
Consent does not exist if a person is in a power relationship. The pressure to say yes comes from the fact that a guard, here, is in a position to dispense favour or disfavour.
I am in no way in favor of staff-inmate relationships, but in most relationships the power dynamic is uneven. For example, in most marriages with children the breadwinner has significantly more power, but that does not make sex an assault.
Re-read your statement and replace "staff-inmate" with "adult-child" or "fratboy-unconsciousgirl" and see how it sounds.
Taking this charitably, I would agree with you that in general, sex might still be consensual even if there is some degree of subjective power imbalance between two people. rockstar-fan. politician-staffmember.
However, this does not mean that all power-imbalanced sex is consensual. teacher-underagestudent. undertaker-corpse.
(Strange things can happen when you mix up "there exists" and "for all"...)
Indeed. There are actually two things to consider here:
* The amount of power imbalance. A husband or wife can always get divorced, a staffer can quit (though we shouldn't trivialize this and it's exactly why sexual harassment laws exist), and a rockstar can go home. It's not, relatively, nearly as big a power delta as the one between a prisoner and those who imprison him. Hard to think of a bigger power difference, actually.
* The kind of power. The power being wielded by prison staff is violent coercive power. They can throw the prisoner into solitary or just beat him (or, if the staffer isn't actually a guard, they have access to people who are). In fact, that coercive power is what keeps the prisoner in prison in the first place.
Between those two things, it's really hard to see how a staff/inmate relationship can be consensual. "You want to do this, right? You know that being in a position to hurt you is literally my job, right? Oh good."
When the bread-winner imprisons his/her partner that is considered a crime. Lets not start with crappy analogies.
edit: Bring a response instead of a down-vote. This community's weak point is when discussion is put to the wayside in favor of a quick and easy up or down vote. More to the point: Eff off anonymous down-voters, a prison guard is not a bread winner in a sexual assault relationship. This is just a really bad analogy that shouldn't be given support.
Uk point of view here. I have no understanding what Americans want out of the prison system. This was brought home to me when I watched (ex UK minister) Micheal Portillo's programme on Death Row.
He is a believer in the death penalty, but went through the programme appalled by the torment suffered by prisoners. During the programme he researched, and found, a humane way of killing a prisoner. Then, he took it to a leading advocate of capital punishment in America, only to be told it wasn't painful enough.
Like I say, I have no understanding of this attitude, but I suspect the prison rape issue in the US won't change until the majority of people get past the idea that the prime thing to do to criminals is punishment.
To keep them out of general society. Possibly to put them in a situation where they can be reformed to rejoin society. Setting aside ethics entirely, prisons cost resources and also take human resources out of society. It's in society's best interest to reform a prisoner and release them ASAP, provided the reform works and they are no longer a danger to society.
Obviously there's a lot of vague terms and wiggle room in that paragraph, but there's certainly a purpose to prisons aside from punishment.
I agree that keeping criminals out of the streets is the first reason. But also to make an example, so future crimes are prevented. Then, while we're at it, rehabilitation.
Punishment is a barbaric way to look at it. Revenge doesn't mix very well with a legal system. (emotions vs objetive POV)
I believe it is Norway or Sweden that has prisons dedicated to protecting society and rehabilitating the offender. As a result, the prison community looks remarkably like an ordinary society, the primary difference being that the prisoners are not allowed to leave. Reading about it was eye opening.
Well, there's punishment and there's "punishment". I think if you ask most sane minded fair persons they'd say that punishment would entail having your freedoms curtailed, being removed from society, having access to friends/family/associates controlled and restricted - i.e. loss of liberty.
However during this period of incarceration, prisoners have a right not to be physically and mentally abused by their fellow inmates and jailers. Incarceration is the punishment, not beatings and rapes.
As to the killing of death row prisoners, their punishment involves not just the loss of their liberty, but also their loss of the right to live the remainder of their natural lives. But it does not give the state the right to make participant endure several minutes of deliberate and avoidable excruciating pain whilst being put to death. I'm fairly certain your justice system doesn't codify that kind of barbarism as part of the death sentence.
If The Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland can provide pain free assisted suicides then surely it's possible to kill death row prisoners just as humanely in the US.
Torture is effective at hurting people, just not at getting truthful information from people. If your goal for a justice system is to hurt people, there's no reason to exclude torture other than squeamishness and the desire to create a faux-clinical atmosphere.
In a pure theoretical sense, yes torture is very effective at hurting people. But only for watchers or executioners who have a need of seeing the person being tortured suffer. I really doubt if traumatizing (torture > just hurting/punishing) a criminal is going to change his behaviour for the better.
The question then would be if the goal of a justice system should be to hurt people in the most effective way imaginable.
I don't know what you mean by creating a "faux-clinical atmosphere".
Isn't the reason for punishing criminals that they broke some aspect of acceptable social interaction (not hurting others a major one of those aspects) ? Even in the context of the state having the monopoly on the use violence, they should not use violence to the fullest extent possible, if only to prove that some actions are really unacceptable and there is never a reason to sink to the same level of what the criminal did. Criminals may be one-time-offenders or life-long-monsters, they are still humans.
You may call that squeamish, but i don't think torture should have any place in a modern society.
The goal of a criminal justice system is to apply justice, not to exact revenge.
Using torture as a punishment will result in making those convicted of crimes even more dehumanized and depraved.
Furthermore, if torture is employed it is a guarantee that wrongfully convicted people will be tortured as well.
Cruelty should not be a tool of a system that is truly just. That is why 'cruel and unusual punishment' is specifically prohibited in the Constitution.
So should police, etc. Footage automatically goes both to the police force, a neutral third party, and the the ACLU/whatever equivalent, so as to avoid any accusation of 'missing' footage.
I don't know much about prison, having fortunately never been there. So I just can't understand how an officer can have any kind of unsupervised and unseen time with inmates. I just assumed everything everywhere in a prison is monitored and recorded.
Modern prisons are, ironically enough, reverse panopticons. Governments do very little to monitor and protect the people it's placed under bodily control, even going so far as to create vast dark privatized spaces where it can maintain a careful ignorance of all the horrible things that go on in them.
And this is by, at least implicit, intent. Prison in the US fits into a punitive, even retributional model. If you hurt society you get hurt in return. If you do something bad you get punished. Fear and rememberance of punishment is what keeps people in line. In such a model it's undesirable for prison conditions to be mild or tolerable, the more intolerable and brutal the better, because that makes them a more effective punishment.
It's a model that has continued to be used in the American justice system for centuries, but it's not a system based on any scientific principles. Worse, it doesn't actually work. As often as not prison breeds worse criminals rather than keeping people on the straight and narrow.
It works exactly as it's supposed to: as the primary instrument of white supremacy in a war against racial minorities. That's why the Drug War figures so prominently in explaining why we have a higher rate of imprisonment than any other country in the world, and why minorities are so disproportionately targeted in the drug war for petty offenses like using and selling crack (despite it being less pure than coke) or marijuana (itself a term that Anslinger brought to prominence in the 1930's to racialize the drug and the war against it).
In practice it may work out that way, but I don't believe that the majority of actors within the criminal justice system are acting in bad faith or are intentionally advancing a racist agenda. Indeed, many LEOs are racial minorities.
I don't think it's helpful to characterize the actions of officers or DAs as racist per se but rather to point to the racist consequences of drug laws, LEO behavior, and so on. I think the number of people within the system acting in good faith far outweigh the number of bad actors and if we desire change it'll be easier if we can convince such folks into coming to "our side" rather than vilifying them.
Their unions do, however. I'm not anti-union, but do tend to be anti-police union.
The California Correctional Officers union is routinely accused of pushing for harsher punishments as a job guarantee, which of course is a problem in a state with such over-crowding of its prisons like California. I would accuse them of gross moral indecency but it takes a pretty indecent person to become a CO anyways.
I have a friend who works on security systems for jails. There are plenty of areas unrecorded. There is cost for one thing - prisons are large places and recording all of it is expensive. There is also the hardware - all cameras etc are a possible source of bits and pieces that could be made into weapons or other contraband.
Hearing the security procedures that goes into taking actual tools into a jail makes your realise how locked down they are - every single item (down to a set of keys) has to be inventoried on the way in, and on the way out. No phones taken in - no exceptions. Bear in mind that staff working on security systems never get in the same space as prisoners - it's not like they're fixing cameras in the cafeteria while the prisoners mill around.
As an aside, he is investigating the use of automated drones for doing perimeter patrols. They are good at flying a set pattern with a camera payload. But there are many kinks to work out.
Keep in who is doing the monitoring, guards who look to be often involved sexual assault. See comment on consent I responded to in this article's thread. The situation of the victim is one of imprisonment, nearly every variable of their life is defined by the (sometimes rapist) guards.
Correctional facility is what they call them, yep.
It's funny, it's so easy to look down on the norms of the medieval era as barbaric but in many ways there are elements of our society which are just as bad, but somehow we continue to tolerate them. Fortunately there are aspects that are better, and maybe we can bootstrap ourselves out of this mess, it's still rather distressing to see how much work is left to do. But we've made a lot of progress on several fronts that is rather remarkable when you think about it. Growing backlash against drug prohibition, increasing acceptance of homosexuality, improving (gradually) racial relations, and so on. Even in the '90s the idea of interracial couples used to be a "big deal" now for the vast majority of folks under 35 it's fully normalized. And the issue of our broken criminal justice system is gaining more and more traction, so I have hope that we'll make progress there as well.
Well, technically they're responsible for all of them. Any crime which befalls someone within their custody is by definition their fault. The fact that the US government isn't held liable for such crimes is bizarre.
Some commenter here recently compared the likelihood there was a COINTELPRO-like operation in our DoJ to space aliens, implying that only stupid and paranoid people could believe such a thing.
Some people here are entirely too impressed with helping catch "bad guys" and need to put away their Cracker Jack badges and realize they are part of the problem.
This is the system that Manning and Assange and Snowden face. If you think they are cowards, think again. If you think Swartz was a coward, shame on you.
Ugh, I didn't see that post. Implying that the probability that the US government engaged in COINTELPRO is significantly below 1 requires far more paranoia than belief to the contrary, given that the program was exposed, studied and publicly reported on at just about every level of government, and that the FBI itself confirms[1] that COINTELPRO did in fact exist.
Unless you meant the poster on here was saying that you'd have to be paranoid to believe that there is any sort of modern form of COINTELPRO. We are quickly going into the unknowable (to outsiders) and therefore faith-based, but certainly I wouldn't call it crazy to think that the US government might be engaging in some sort of covert operations today that are similar to covert-but-exposed operations from 40 years ago. To rule that out as inconceivable or stupid requires quite a lot of faith.
The DoJ itself has called various 21st FBI investigations of political dissidents troubling or improper[2]. And as far as I know, not one person in the FBI even so much as lost their job over COINTELPRO, so I'm not sure how one could suggest that we live in a world today where COINTELPRO-like programs simply couldn't exist. Of course the tactics would be different today, but that's probably more a reflection of the fact that technology enables all sorts of surveillance that wouldn't have been imaginable decades ago, than any sort of fundamental shift in what is or isn't considered reasonable or possible by the top echelons of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.
"On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained:
"'I also was protesting against the bail system, under which the privileged, the white, the middle class escape the pre-trial confinements which go automatically to the poor and black. In good conscience I could not take advantage of the privileges available to me.
"'Even in jail, however, I could not escape those privileges. I was sent directly to cell block four, third floor — the privileged area where I could and did play chess with Gordon Liddy, where one-man rooms for 45 respectable prisoners were never locked.'
"Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he heard that Donaldson worked for The Washington Post and, suspected him of being in prison 'to try to steal a march[(?)]' on Woodward and Bernstein by getting a first hand story", and expressed the wish that he be transferred elsewhere.
"However, Donaldson himself in 'The Punk Who Wouldn't Shut Up', states that guard captain Clinton Cobb had him moved to the most dangerous cell-block in the prison and his subsequent rapes arranged as he believed him to be writing a piece on prison corruption for The Washington Post.
"That night, Donaldson was lured into a cell by a prisoner who claimed that he and his friends wanted to 'discuss pacifism' with him in their cells. He was then anally and orally raped dozens of times by an estimated 45 male inmates. He suffered additional abuse a second night before he escaped from his tormentors (two of whom were pimping him to the others for cigarettes) and collapsed, sobbing, at the cell block gate where guards retrieved him. After a midnight examination at D.C. General Hospital (during which he remained handcuffed) he was returned to the jail hospital, untreated either for physical injury or emotional trauma.
"Donaldson later claimed that the guards told him he'd been deliberately set up by Captain Cobb. The following morning, Lucy Witt, one of the White House Seven, posted his bond and took him to a doctor."
After watching "Orange is the new black" I thought prison was a really really dark place. Sexual assault is probably worse than worrying about next guy stab you.
While reading this article, I entertained the possibility of robot guards. The only problem is that prisoners can break them or alert the robots. Any idea how to keep these robots safe?
Deploy more robots! For every robot that is damaged send out two to replace it, one in a "get the job done" mode and the other in a "cover that guy" mode
A few things. My girlfriend is a prison nurse, and a good friend's brother is a CO at another prison.
1. The population of guards is pretty bad. The job pays approximately $shit, (Good overtime possibilities, though) and the staff's quality suffers as a result. Frequently, you end up with criminals guarding the criminals. Said guards are often compromised and either become indifferent to criminal behavior or actively aid it.
2. Female guards perform poorly compared to male guards. This is due to a variety of things, but the biggest reason is that inmates are much more willing to test female guards. "Testing" involves intimidation, trying to bribe them, seducing them, harassing them, etc. A male guard commands a certain amount of respect simply by existing that a female guard does not get. My friend's brother summarizes it by saying, "A male guard can point to the rules and say, "Sorry, just doing my job," and an inmate will understand that it's the Man keeping him down and not the man. A female guard, because she's perceived as weaker, doesn't get that ability. Prisoners think they can get away with it because the woman isn't going to enforce the rules." From this, he asserts that the ideal male guard is an unthinking robot. "Sorry, you have violated Rule 21. I have to write you up. No exceptions." Meanwhile, an ideal female guard is a "crazy, man-hating, psychotic bitch" who takes sadistic pleasure in making prisoners' lives hell. She won't get any respect otherwise.
Due to most women being decent human beings, this leads to even higher rates of women being compromised compared to men. Whether it's from being intimidated or seduced, women end up giving favors, fucking inmates, or turning a blind eye to drug activity, rape, and violence. Men do it too, (see the "criminals guarding criminals" section) but at lower rates.
3. Due to a variety of factors, including too many prisoners, not enough for them to do, and a pervasive atmosphere of the animals running the zoo, drama is the primary occupation of most of the inmates. After all, they have nothing better to do. So they make excitement. They fuck with guards, fuck with each other, gamble, (which leads to fucking with each other because debts are created) rape each other, try to seduce the female guards, harass the medical staff, do drugs, make bullshit accusations against the prison just because they can, and so on. To counter this, prison staff frequently collaborate with the gang bosses. They tell the gang boss, "Hey, Jerry's being a pain. Can you take care of him for us?" Jerry gets his ass kicked, and the problem goes away. In return, the prison turns a blind eye to the things that the gang boss is doing. This, of course, leads to prison-sanctioned violence and rape.
Fixing this requires a hard look at what we use our prison system for. I think that we use it for far too much. We shouldn't be sentencing minor drug offenders and petty criminals to prison; it overloads the system and turns the place into a teeming madhouse where the prison staff is focused on survival, not actually rehabilitating the inmates.
In combination with this, we need to get better quality guards. Currently, corrections officers are frequently the failures who couldn't become cops. We need to change that by offering competitive pay. Doing this requires the prison system to shrink and become a smaller organization. Prisons should be focused facilities rather than being a Walmart.
Finally, I'd also suggest segregating prisons by race, but all the hippie Integration Uber Alles people would whine about it.
As the internet is pretty much constantly under attack by voyeuristic and censorious governments, civil rights are a matter of close interest to hackers. This spills over into civil-rights issues not directly related to the internet.
Consent is a complicated issue. Inmates in a prison can fully consent, but to determine if they are consenting is beyond even a simple psychological evaluation, and certainly beyond the judgement of a horny guard.
On the other hand, in Aljazeera's home country "sexual assault" is punishable for the victim, and if anything about conservative sharia based marriages holds true in Qatar, most sexual assailants are actually husbands. (Minors can't consent, and having sex with non-consenting minors even if she is married to her assailant is technically called a sexual assault)
To be clear: I'm not overly judging, not calling for action or hatred against the people of Quatar, just pointing out a perspective for Al Jazeera accusing the US. I do think the US needs to get its penal system in shape though, for the benefit of all concerned...
Al Jazeera aren't accusing the US of anything. They are simply reporting the contents of a report [1] published by the US Department of Justice. The accusation is coming from the US Government, not Quatar.
"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...