And my apologies for the double post, I posted, then looked on page 1 of the thread, couldn’t find my post, and :smack:
w.
I’d say it depends greatly on the length of the confinement. A guy who knows exacty when his segregation will end doesn’t react the same as a man isolated for an indefinate period.
It’s not only the cost. The general public deeply resents paying tax money for anything that smacks of “luxury” for prisoners. I can see the headlines if a politician proposed the in-cell education system: “Senator So-And-So wants to give inmates computers and DVD players in their cells!”
Not too long ago, there was a minor “scandal” in our area over the fact that the inmates in my husband’s prison get cable. Citizens were aghast at the notion, and poor Hubby fielded many angry phone calls. He tried to explain that the reason the inmates have “cable” is so we can control what they watch-- they get seven censored channels, four of which are the networks, one is educational and one is the prison announcement channel (running rebroadcasts of religious services, lunch menus and the like.) There were many who greeted this explanation with the firm opinion that even* that* was too much for them.
(There was even outrage over the new basketball court put in for the inmates, though no tax money was used-- it was all money earned by the inmates for the recreation fund. People just thought they shouldn’t have it.)
Secondly, electronics are not tamper-proof. There are some extremely brght, creative people in prison, and I’ll give you a 100%-money-back-guarantee that if you gave them unmonitored access to a computer, someone would figure out how to link it to the internet–which is a huge security risk-- or use its inner parts for some other nefarious purpose.
This is interesting. All of the bits below I found surprising. Others are doing a far better job of commenting on all of this so I just offer the following as grist for the mill. I am not sure what to make of it all anyway.
Not as many as I thought to be honest but then this is only based on people who reported rape (I think). I have not found stats on how many rapes they suspect go unreported.
It seems the staff can be regarded as nearly as dangerous to the prisoners than the prisoners are to each other.
It also would seem the juve is far more dangerous than state prisons.
This just blows my mind. Totally opposite of what I would have assumed.
Keep in mind that in many states any case of sex between an employee and a prisoner is classified as rape - it doesn’t matter if the prisoner consented or even initiated the sex. For legal purposes, prisoners are considered like minors.
Let me add two thoughts:
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Allegations are different that substantiated allegations. It is very common for inmates to accuse staff of activities which did not occur. Please add the false accusation factor to what Nemo said when you are interpreting those stats.
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Juvenile (adolescent in some jurisdicitons) facilties are almost always the most violent. The prevailing theory is that the youngsters come in with “chips on their shoulders” and without the experience necessary to understand that physical violence is almost always a losing proposition. The older inmates have learned over time and various previous incarcerations that “getting by” is more important and probably a better survival strategy.
Look at my cite again. The numbers above are all substantiated numbers.
They even tell us about the ones they are unsure of.
Lets look at the cite:
Here is the organization of the statement:
Paragraph #1 -Total allegations
Paragraph #2 - Substantiated incidents
Paragraph #3 - insufficient evidence
Paragraph #4 and 5 - demographics
sorry - hit the submit button early – (is premature submission a problem?)
What the difference in our reading of the report is boiled down to defining “55% with insufficient evidence” as being part of the overall problem, (it probably occurred but no one can really prove it) or part of the reduction of the problem (it probably never occurred, but we can’t prove that it didn’t happen).
Kind of a variation on the glass half full or glass half empty riddle.
While those of us who have worked in correctional facilities for long periods understand that inmate allegations of misconduct (sexual, brutality, abuse of authority, etc.) are quite common and quite normally bullshit, there are those on the outside who think that many officers are brutal and corrupt. btw - I am not saying that anyone on this board thinks that… but there are those who do.
The DOJ is laying this out in very neutral language that can be read in several ways. Feel free to interpret your own way.
It happens to a lot of guys on occasion. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I’m not interpreting it…just reading it. Seems straightforward to me.
From the cite linked above:
So…we have 8,210 claims and the cite says 2100 incidents were verified. 42% (of 8210=3448) of all allegations were staff on inmate violence. Of those 45% (1552) were substantiated.
So nearly half of verified sexual crimes committed in prisons are committed by the prison staff. A bit more than half seem to be bullshit claims as you mentioned.
Make of that what you will as I made no comment beyond being surprised by the numbers I cited.
That’s the case in my state.
From the study that Whack-A-Mole posted:
With two or three exceptions, the staff members my husband has fired for “innapropriate relationships” with inmates have all been female. Having a relationship with an inmate can be very attractive to a vulnerable woman, for several reasons:
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The woman has all the power in the relationship. She can dictate when and where she will see him, and if she gets angry with him, can punish him.
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Inmates can be very “romantic.” They spend hours creating letters and gifts for the woman. They beg to see her. Some women get off on the idea of a man having nothing to do but dream of them all day. (Like a harem, really.)
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They think they never have to worry about the man cheating on them. (A very bad assumption, as it turns out. Many of these Romeos are courting other women on the side.)
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The excitement of the forbidden, and the romantic notion of throwing it all away for the man they love. One woman that worked in my husband’s prison lost her job, her husband of ten years and her kids when her relationship with an inmate was discovered.
Are we both using the same legal term of “rape” here? I can certainly see that a staff member would be fired for having sex with the inmates but are you saying this carries with it the full force of a rape charge as well? Rape is a heavy duty felony and it seems excessive if a consenting, adult inmate gets lucky.
I am not arguing with you here…just curious.
I can only speak from my experience with Hubby’s prison. As I understand they COULD be charged with rape (statutory, IIRC) but in practice, very few of them are. Most of the time what happens is they’re asked to write out a confession (to avoid any potential for lawsuits alledging they were forced to leave without cause) and then are allowed to resign.
The issue is probably prosecutorial time. Faced with many cases of murders, robberies and violent rapes, prosecutors generally don’t want the bother of adding what is really a statutory offense.
I wanted to add some details that I thought were missing about the Pennsylvania system. All of this information was told to me by the tour guide at the Port Arthur prison ruin in Tasmania.
As has been noted, the Pennsylvania system involved incarceration of the sort mentioned in the OP. At Port Arthur, this system emphasized extreme isolation. Prisoners weren’t merely put in their cells by themselves and left to their own devices. Prisoners were silenced, and any contact with another human was minimized. When prisoners were massed together, or whenever there was a chance that a prisoner would see another person, hoods were employed, meaning that all prisoners were hooded whenever removed from their cells so that they wouldn’t see another human face. As much silence as possible was enforced - making too much noise meant punishment. Guards took extreme precautions so that any human contact was minimized.
Imagine that - hardly ever hearing another person’s voice, never seeing another human face. Your whole life, alone. The punishment was far harsher than merely being alone most of the time; instead, you ceased to have any sort of human contact. It’s a level of isolation I have difficulty imagining. No wonder so many went insane.
At Port Arthur, there’s a cell that they almost dare you to go into - a number of prisoners attempted suicide there, and they say that their despair lingers there and affects today’s tourists. I’m not one to believe in much of the paranormal, but I didn’t go in.
I wonder if insanity would be as much of a possibility today. Of course they specifically kept the prisoners “alone” back them in every way possible. But today if you allowed a prisoner access to television and/or a radio I wonder if they’d face the same effects.
Ok…I know it seems weird to think televison could do this but why not? While it is not an interpersonal interaction the viewer still gets to see other people, hear other human voices and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was enough to allow a person to keep their sanity while otherwise isolated. That said IANAPsychologist so do not really know.
Television didn’t seem to have much beneficial effects for the inmates in the Super Max prison in which my husband worked. All of the inmates wanted them, of course, but it didn’t seem to alleviate their lonliness.
People crave interaction, not just the sight/sound of other people. The inmates in my husband’s prison would go to enormous lengths just to have slight contact with others. There were elaborate systems of passing notes via weighted strings and the like.
Fair enough but do the prisoners go insane today when in isolation as they did in the past (assuming today they have access to television)?
Personally I am not so concerned if they are lonely while in prison but more concerned that they may walk out one day stark, raving mad from having been in there.
It’s not surprising that most cases of sex between employees and inmates involve a female employee and a male inmates. Most inmates are male and most sex will be between a man and a woman. So male inmate/female employee is going to be the most common combination.
Yes, an employee having sex with an inmate is a Class E felony in New York state and people have been imprisoned for it.
It’s somewhat hard to say because the sample of prisoners in Super Max who are not already suffering from some sort of mental illness is somewhat small-- i.e, most of the guys in there were crazy to begin with, and the prison itself has a small population (only about two hundred, last I heard.) So an informal study of the small number of “normal” prisoners would be flawed from the outset.
Antectdotally, what Hubby observed was that the “normal” ones exhibited a lot of distress-- there were several suicides.
I will state with certainty that inmates who go to medium security insitutions are nominally better prepared for life on the outside. They can learn job skills and social skills (how to speak politely, for example), participate in art clubs and other programs. (My husband’s prison has a service-dog training program in which the inmates raise puppies.)
Hey, speaking of the puppy program, perhaps this might add a bit to the benefits of the social aspects. There was a marked reduction in stress and outbursts after the puppies came to the prison. Inmates were on their best behavior because they wanted to participate, and uber-dilligent in caring for them because they wanted to keep their puppies.
My husband said the changes he saw in individuals were astonishing-- young “punks” who wanted to do nothing but fight and get in trouble were rolling on the floor with puppies, laughing and cooing to them. It’s perhaps an oversimplification, but it would seem that some of them “learned to love.” I saw the most amazing examples of community and sharing come out of this program, and have little hesitation in claiming that it changed some lives for the better.
But I digress . . . the social word of the prison is beneficial to some inmates. It’s hard for people who were raised in functional families to understand, but some of these guys sincerely don’t understand whythey should obey the rules of society. They were raised that if you want it, take it, and beat anyone who tries to take it from you. Prison can sometimes be their first introduction to the concept of obeying a rule because their behavior affects others. Some of them may never truly gasp the idea of empathy (i.e not doing something because it hurts others) but getting a whole dorm of men pissed at you because you lost them a privledge is a crash course in cause=effect.
They also have to learn how to share personal space without driving their roomates insane. They learn how to interract with authority figures-- to ask politely instead of demand. Hell, even simple things like “if you don’t get out of bed on time, you’ll miss breakfast.”
They also learn something that could probably benefit quite a few people on the outside: that they are just another individual, nothing special. If you miss breakfast, they won’t cook a special one just for you. They learn that their “special circumstances” doesn’t get them to the front of the line, nor does anyone make exceptions for them. Whining about it only makes people laugh at them.
I know these things sound petty, but sometimes guys do leave the prison with better social/job skills than they had when they came in, and interracting with others is a big part of that.
I’d be curious to know how many of those rapes counted in my cite above are of the statutory type and how many are forcible (I use “forcible” loosely to include coercion). To me the word “rape” carries certain horrible connotations and I cannot see my way to lumping in some guy in prison who happily got his rocks off with someone else equally willing as “rape”. That said I agree the staff member should be fired for having sex with inmates but a rape charge for making some guy’s day? Nope…
Thinking on it though I have to wonder how many of the rapes listed in my cite would actually be of the consentual sort. By that I mean I cannot see a guy who got lucky and willingly engaged in sex reporting it to authorities afterwards. It would make no sense. I would think most accusations of rape (assuming sex actually occured and was not just some guy trying to make trouble) would be from someone who was forced in to it in some fashion.
Usually, the relationship is discovered in other ways than the inmate involved reporting it. Other inmates snitch, or the employee’s behavior becomes suspicious and the investigators begin watching them closely. In Hubby’s prison, no inmate has ever accused a staff member of actually *raping *them.
The assumption, legally speaking, is that because of the unequal balance of power, an inmate cannot fully consent to any sex act with a staff person. The inmates are, in a sense, children-- a fifteen year old girl may be fully willing to have sex with an adult, but it’s still illegal.