Exactly. It seems like a slick way to get around the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Well, clearly it’s not that unusual.
No, the first thing we’d have to do is realize that the War On Some Drugs has been an abysmal failure and start reframing laws and penalties so that we’re no longer imprisoning people for marijuana offenses, which constitute slightly more than half of all drug arrests, and have for more than a decade. Legalization will go a long way toward reducing our prison populations.
Let’s get a little perspective here. People are talking about rape being prevalent and all. According to the report that was cited in the OP, 95.6% of all prisoners said they had not been sexually victimized in any way. Compare the 4.4% of prisoners who have been sexually victimized to the 17.6% of all women who have been sexually victimized and the 3% of all men who have been sexually victimized.
And let’s distinguish between rape and other types of sexual victimization. When people talk about prison rape, they’re thinking about Andy Dufresne getting raped by Bogs Diamond in the shower. But forcible rape is the least common type of sexual crime to occur in prison. Most sex crimes are consensual - a prisoner might be coerced into agreeing to or voluntarily offer sex in exchange for favors. But from a legal standpoint, all sexual acts are illegal and any sex between a prisoner and an employee is non-consensual.
I’ll note that the majority of sexual victimization involving staff is “touching”. I’m well aware of these cases - it’s a common event for a prisoner to accuse a guard of fondling him during a pat frisk. Accusing a guard of being a homosexual is a routine form of harassment. I’ll point out that all of these accusations are investigated and documented. Any accusation of actual sex occurring automatically brings in outside police investigators.
David42 suggested some things prisons should be doing. Pretty much all of them have already been done years ago. Prisons are all hooked up with cameras, the cameras are monitored by outside agencies, we do have all of the laws he suggested. The only thing we don’t do is allow people on the street to watch the cameras - because not surprisingly most prisoners do not want to have their lives turned into a reality show for the general public.
That’s really more of a legal reform than a prison reform. Prisons have no say in who goes to prison.
But I will point out that if your released every person in prison who was serving time just for marijuana possession, you wouldn’t even notice they were gone - it’s less than one percent.
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that most inmate-on-inmate rape would go unreported for reasons which are obvious, making the kinds of figures we’ve seen cited in this thread unreliable… To conclude on the basis of such figures that guards are responsible for most prison rapes is unsafe, to say the very least.
Pay per view?
Again, the figures are based on a survey of prisoners, not compiled from reported assaults. They could of course still be unreliable, but there’s no real motive to lie.
If a prisoner is coerced, then by definition it is not consensual.
Something I’ve posted in the past. Prison is the worst possible place to commit a rape. One, you’re surrounded by guards. But even more relevant, you can’t leave the crime scene.
Imagine somebody just held a knife to your throat and raped you. Imagine what you would want to do to your rapist if you had the chance.
Now imagine you know exactly where your rapist lives and he can’t go anywhere.
Sure it is. The coercion itself may give rise to another criminal charge, but rape requires force or the threat of force.
other “more civilized” countries don’t have as many blacks in prison. They also don’t have lots of whites incarcerated next to the blacks.
Coercion is not the same as force.
Uh… so what?
In any case, that’s patently untrue. African-Americans make up 12% of the US prison population; Afro-Carribeans make up 11% of the UK prison population.
Except that prisoners have no reason to believe that any surveys they participate in will be kept private. Paranoia(justified, for the most part) might cause them to answer as they have.
Perhaps, but the NIS-2 is anonymous.
Inmates taking the computer survey would suspect they were being monitored by prison staff, and those taking the paper survey would have no reason to trust either those distributing the surveys or those picking them up. Prisoners expect no privacy rights-“We’re from the Government-Trust us” might not convince those in prison.
Exactly. I’ve worked with some people who’ve dealt with inmates (in the health care field), and they insist that the number of inmates who come in for sexual assault injuries and treatment far outweighs what’s reported. I wouldn’t doubt that the vast majority of sexual assault in prison is inmate-on-inmate, but they just don’t snitch. Stigma is a powerful tool of oppression.
That’s a possible (though IMHO spurious) reason to believe the survey under-reports abuse by prison staff. What reason is there to believe it under-reports abuse by inmates?
You can equally well make a plausible argument that prisoners who have been sexually victimized have more reason to participate in a voluntary study of the subject. So the participants are a self-selected group with a higher-than-average percentage of victims. And that would mean that the genuine percentage of sexual victims is lower than four percent.
There’s no point in going back and forth on the issue. For the purposes of this thread, let’s assume the figures we have are accurate.