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Comment by GodofGrunts | Hacker News Reader

"It bans shackling pregnant prisoners and mandates that tampons and sanitary napkins be available to women."

Holy shit. How is this not a thing already?

I'd argue that one of the reasons we have so many violations of basic human dignity in our prison system is that Congress has gone out of its way to prevent inmates from suing for their rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Litigation_Reform_Act

Nobody likes lawsuits or lawyers, but judicial remedies are often the only option for relief that inmates have. When you take that away from them, they are at the absolute mercy of the prison bureaucracy.

Your constitutional rights have been violated? Tough, go fill out a grievance form.

Felons are restricted from voting in many places, too.

I think part of it is the underlying costs of putting so many people in prison then having to eat the "for profit" costs of supplying them with tampons and napkins - i.e. necessities. Even then, you can't even do something like hand out diva cups and reusable clothes?

"The bill, which is expected to be debated in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, would only affect federal prisoners accounting for about 10% of the total US prison population."

The other 90% of prisoners do not necessarily have them. It really isn't a thing already, even with this.

Maybe a judge could apply due process to force private prisons to apply the same protections for prisoners similar to how the federal govt, specifically District of Columbia, was forced to integrate schools in Bolling v. Sharpe. The 14th amendment should apply if it was a state prison but being federal makes it different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolling_v._Sharpe

There is no need to state obvious guidelines, until the obvious guidelines are broken.

My guess is because the rules were written by men without any input from women.

You're absolutely correct. HN hates hearing this, but it's true.

It's actually not true, and that's what makes the lack of these protections so terrible.

It's women, who wrote guidelines about how to treat women, and came up with guidelines worse than guidelines that a bunch of old stodgy men in congress came up with yesterday.

That's a real problem. And it's a problem that we need to try to solve in "Second Step".

I mean, why even have female administrators and wardens putting this stuff together, if they are just going to get their cushy jobs and sit there and try to out "man" the men? The entire reason you're there is to supposedly bring a different sensibility.

What's unstated in placing those requirements in this bill, is how much of a dismal failure our hiring programs have been in bringing in people, (men OR women), with different sensibilities. Whether they are male or female, black, white, asian, or hispanic, these positions seem to attract the same sort of people. People who look at the way things are done, and don't see any problem with it.

We need to start looking past identity politics and start seeing that issue.

If you read nimbius' response above, you'll have a better idea of why this was.

Basically, prisoners are responsible for purchasing their own sanitary supplies (among other things), men and women.

While this is definitely a factor, I'd like to point out that there is a whole range of humiliating policies(like the fact that you may have to go without toilet paper for bad behaviour) that affects men and women alike, and then the fact that women can be just as bad towards other women too. I wouldn't be surprised if a woman administrator made the same decisions because degrading prisoners is considered a good thing in many places.

Things like this used to be what the officer's discretion was for. It used to be that "inhumane treatment" was used on a case by case for prisoners who would take advantage if treated normally (shackles for the prisoner who will run if not shackled, toilet paper instead of tampons for the prisoner that will do I don't know what if given tampons, etc.). Over time these things became the default and decent treatment became the exception rather than the norm. Therefore we didn't used to need a law but we do now.

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