Depending on where you live, you may have heard of the unfortunate case of Jessica Ridgeway, in which the 10-year-old girl was abducted from a park near her home about a month ago and (apparently) murdered by 17-year-old Austin Reed Sigg. While Sigg will be tried as an adult, he is eligible for neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment w/o parole. That said, they can presumably keep him in prison forever via a succession of parole hearings.
Background aside this brings to mind a common theme from any number of Gritty Crime Dramas in the style of Law and Order and the like, in which those who harm children are subjected the disproportional abuse at the hands of their fellow prisoners. In the Ridgeway case, people are already muttering about the probability of Sigg being raped/murdered in prison specifically because of the age of his victim.
So I have to ask it:
Is this oft-repeated idea true? Is there actually statistical evidence somewhere to back the claim that murdering a child nets one more abuse in prison than murdering an adult? And how do other prisoners even know what the new guy did unless they’ve been following the news on TV?
I found this thread from Snopes on the matter and, while anecdotes are plentiful, there is little in the way of hard data or official statements apart from a (now broken) link to a statement on the part of the Correctional Service of Canada indicating that such people are, indeed, in greater danger than the general prison population.
Thank you for your reply. That said, it looks as if essentially all of the posts in all three threads fall under two categories:
[ul]
[li]References to a particular prisoner who was killed[/li][li]Anecdotes[/li][/ul]
While I agree that pointing to a particular individual who harmed children and was later murdered in prison is consistent with the idea that such people are harmed in prison, it doesn’t really get at what I want to know: Is there any data that bears out the idea that such people are harmed with a frequency/intensity that clearly exceeds the harm ventured on other sorts prisoner?
Along the same lines, all the anecdotes about people who know a guy who was in prison or a guy who works at a prison are interesting to read, but don’t really get at the factual nature of the question. Even relatively high-quality anecdotes like this one are only passingly useful in that they remain purely anecdotal.
I gather that the OP is less interested in anecdotes about such and such prisoner who was or who was not targeted or “common sense” conclusions on risk but is interested in cold hard numbers. Are there any statistics on prisoner-on-prisoner violence that include prisoner age or victim age as an independent variable?
I doubt there are any reliable statistics on this at all, especially about prison rape.
Based on my small amount of work with ex-prisoners, many (most?) prison rapes are not even reported, much less recorded and statisticized. What prison administration is going to keep careful statistics on something that shows how bad a job they are doing?
The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects data on sexual victimization in prisons and jails, and publishes some of the results. Although it doesn’t completely answer the OP’s question, they have reported that violent sex offenders *in general *are substantially more likely to be sexually assaulted while in prison/jail. Here’s the first publication I happened to find; note data are from a survey of former prisoners, rather than from correctional facility administrators.
There’s a blog I keep an eye on written by a sex offender who is currently in prison. It certainly seems that it is not a fun thing to be. The blog is at http://www.joetheso.com
[nitpick in appreciation]
“Passing useful.” I haven’t seen that use of “passing” since Shakespeare, but it is still proper and fine English. “Passing fair” sticks in my head for some reason.
[/nitpick in appreciation]
It would be an easy - albeit slightly unethical - experiment to carry out. Show the results on a cable channel and you could even clock up some nice ppv buys.
I woudn’t imagine that there is any data to bear out the idea that strangers walking into a bar and insulting the hardest man there’s wife would be more likely to get a slap than strangers walking into the same bar, buying a drink and quietly reading a newspaper.
Empirical evidence is your friend…
There’s a reason these prisoners are segregated (In the UK at least), and it’s not to protect the rest of the prison population from them…