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Comment by jabbernotty | Hacker News Reader

Some of what you mentioned here, if not most, seems specific to the USA, from my western European point of view. Do you know of any explanation for that?

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Visibility for one. The French prison system is horrible, the British prison system is also pretty bad. Beyond that I'd have to blame the war on drugs and general societal attitudes. The general attitude seems to be that once you have been adjudicated a "bad guy" and are put into the prison population anything that happens to you is fair game.

The French prison system is severely underfunded leading to very poor living conditions, but there is none of this attitude that it's OK for people to be raped if they're criminals. The statistics for rape in US prisons are absolutely appalling; I have never seen such data for French prisons, but I would guess, or at least hope, that it is much less common.

> none of this attitude

This is not an actual prevailing attitude in the US.

Yes it is.

If you are going to level an accusation like 'the majority of Americans think prisoner-on-prisoner rape is a-ok', then the burden of proof is on you.

I won't even say that nobody thinks that way, I just want proof that this is the prevailing mindset.

It's pretty easy to see that if there's not acceptance, there's at least almost complete apathy. There hasn't exactly been many widespread calls for better conditions in our prisons, and in day to day life, I've never heard anyone suggest it.

I would say that the majority don't care, and depending on how you phrase the question, you could get them to swing either way. The problem is that in public discourse, prison rape is seen as a punchline, not a blight.

The topic of prison rape is a joke that people as a whole feel comfortable laughing about in public.

It is undeniably normative.

Joking about things that are in despicable in reality is commonplace. The TV show "Family Guy" features a pedophile as a main character. Do you think this means the audience or producers feel this is normal and acceptable?

He's not presented in a positive or socially acceptable light. He's funny (to some) because he's transgressive.

People laugh at prison rape because those guys are bad so rape is okay.

Not only is the French prison system severely underfunded, as you say, but it has been consistently so for years, despite repeated warnings from the EU. This has been compounded by recent laws handing out longer prison sentences for more crimes (but obviously not following through with a matching increase in funding for the prison system).

As very few prisoners actually vote, this horrid blight on France's human rights track record isn't going to change in a hurry.

Is it common for convicts to hold the right to vote in Europe, unlike in the US?

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