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Comment by ilovetux | Hacker News Reader

I would like to piggyback on this sentiment to call out a common feeling in the US (and probably elsewhere).

When people are facing jail time, they are usually told to expect to be brutalized in prison by the other prisoners and guards.

Putting additional punishment in the form of abuse (physical, mental and sexual) and then putting the onus of that additional punishment on a vulnerable population is a recipe for disaster.

Prison is the punishment, anything on top of that is a crime and a lot of people turn short sentences into life by targeting other prisoners with certain crimes.

This culture of retribution runs deep.

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>When people are facing jail time Actually, it's when _men_ are facing jail time, that people make rape jokes. I've never really heard people do it for women at all.

Not only is that sort of thing much less prevalent in prisons than media would have you believe, media still perpetuates this stereotype, just as it perpetuates the "all gay men are fruity heyyyyyy" stereotype that I also loathe. But the extract media and popular opinion is; rape jokes about men are funny, men being assaulted or kicked in the balls is funny, men dying on screen is just a bad guy or a henchman but a woman dying on screen is either not done, camera cut away or a huge plot point with emphasis on how _evil_ the victim is for doing such a thing.

Men are the victims are of the majority of crime, however because of sexism many people (including women) are happy to lump men in all together with each other. People don't care if the victim is a man, because the criminal is a man, too. And that's like...the same! :O

> told to expect to be brutalized in prison by the other prisoners and guards

How horrific. I don't understand why the people of the US accept this.

Sounds to me then that it’s working as designed.

Does your ruling of prison rape = "they deserve it anyway", apply to female criminals as well? Go on, make that statement.

All I'm saying is that the system had been designed from the start to be punitive instead of rehabilitative.

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