US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults

Adam Gopnik's piece on The Caging of America does a good job explaining what's going on and summing up my feelings on the topic:

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...

American prisons are a disgrace and a national shame, and prison rapes are one of the most viscerally appalling reminders of that.

These statistics are likely misleading, though: it only includes the 9k or so cases that jail administrators reported. That's likely at least an order of magnitude less than happen in reality, and it's likely that the small minority that are actually reported by administrators have special aspects of them that make them highly non-representative of all sexual violence in prisons. They've passed through (at least) three filters already, for instance: the prisoner deciding to report it at all; the guard reported to seeing fit to report it to higher ups; and the higher ups deciding to report it to the overseeing agency.

Not sure which direction that'd go in, for the record, but it's worth keeping in mind while parsing this report.

It seems that a majority of these cases were actually consensual, not assault:

>Among the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases in 2011, 54 percent were committed by women, the report said. From 2009 to 2011, 84 percent of the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases involved a sexual relationship with a female staff member that “appeared to be willing,” compared to 37 percent of the cases involving male staff members during the same time period.

Those numbers imply that overall, 62% of substantiated staff-on-inmate cases were actually consensual. The headline seems inaccurate given that.

Of course, there are extreme sampling bias issues with this data. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it at all.

Uk point of view here. I have no understanding what Americans want out of the prison system. This was brought home to me when I watched (ex UK minister) Micheal Portillo's programme on Death Row.

He is a believer in the death penalty, but went through the programme appalled by the torment suffered by prisoners. During the programme he researched, and found, a humane way of killing a prisoner. Then, he took it to a leading advocate of capital punishment in America, only to be told it wasn't painful enough.

Like I say, I have no understanding of this attitude, but I suspect the prison rape issue in the US won't change until the majority of people get past the idea that the prime thing to do to criminals is punishment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY

So we are all agreed that all prison guards should wear cameras that record 100% of the time that they are inside the prison?

I don't know much about prison, having fortunately never been there. So I just can't understand how an officer can have any kind of unsupervised and unseen time with inmates. I just assumed everything everywhere in a prison is monitored and recorded.

It's funny, it's so easy to look down on the norms of the medieval era as barbaric but in many ways there are elements of our society which are just as bad, but somehow we continue to tolerate them. Fortunately there are aspects that are better, and maybe we can bootstrap ourselves out of this mess, it's still rather distressing to see how much work is left to do. But we've made a lot of progress on several fronts that is rather remarkable when you think about it. Growing backlash against drug prohibition, increasing acceptance of homosexuality, improving (gradually) racial relations, and so on. Even in the '90s the idea of interracial couples used to be a "big deal" now for the vast majority of folks under 35 it's fully normalized. And the issue of our broken criminal justice system is gaining more and more traction, so I have hope that we'll make progress there as well.

Well, technically they're responsible for all of them. Any crime which befalls someone within their custody is by definition their fault. The fact that the US government isn't held liable for such crimes is bizarre.

Some commenter here recently compared the likelihood there was a COINTELPRO-like operation in our DoJ to space aliens, implying that only stupid and paranoid people could believe such a thing.

Some people here are entirely too impressed with helping catch "bad guys" and need to put away their Cracker Jack badges and realize they are part of the problem.

This is the system that Manning and Assange and Snowden face. If you think they are cowards, think again. If you think Swartz was a coward, shame on you.

Guards and administration are also responsible for some portion of inmate-on-inmate sex assaults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail...

"On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained:

"'I also was protesting against the bail system, under which the privileged, the white, the middle class escape the pre-trial confinements which go automatically to the poor and black. In good conscience I could not take advantage of the privileges available to me.

"'Even in jail, however, I could not escape those privileges. I was sent directly to cell block four, third floor — the privileged area where I could and did play chess with Gordon Liddy, where one-man rooms for 45 respectable prisoners were never locked.'

"Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he heard that Donaldson worked for The Washington Post and, suspected him of being in prison 'to try to steal a march[(?)]' on Woodward and Bernstein by getting a first hand story", and expressed the wish that he be transferred elsewhere.

"However, Donaldson himself in 'The Punk Who Wouldn't Shut Up', states that guard captain Clinton Cobb had him moved to the most dangerous cell-block in the prison and his subsequent rapes arranged as he believed him to be writing a piece on prison corruption for The Washington Post.

"That night, Donaldson was lured into a cell by a prisoner who claimed that he and his friends wanted to 'discuss pacifism' with him in their cells. He was then anally and orally raped dozens of times by an estimated 45 male inmates. He suffered additional abuse a second night before he escaped from his tormentors (two of whom were pimping him to the others for cigarettes) and collapsed, sobbing, at the cell block gate where guards retrieved him. After a midnight examination at D.C. General Hospital (during which he remained handcuffed) he was returned to the jail hospital, untreated either for physical injury or emotional trauma.

"Donaldson later claimed that the guards told him he'd been deliberately set up by Captain Cobb. The following morning, Lucy Witt, one of the White House Seven, posted his bond and took him to a doctor."

After watching "Orange is the new black" I thought prison was a really really dark place. Sexual assault is probably worse than worrying about next guy stab you.

While reading this article, I entertained the possibility of robot guards. The only problem is that prisoners can break them or alert the robots. Any idea how to keep these robots safe?

A few things. My girlfriend is a prison nurse, and a good friend's brother is a CO at another prison.

1. The population of guards is pretty bad. The job pays approximately $shit, (Good overtime possibilities, though) and the staff's quality suffers as a result. Frequently, you end up with criminals guarding the criminals. Said guards are often compromised and either become indifferent to criminal behavior or actively aid it.

2. Female guards perform poorly compared to male guards. This is due to a variety of things, but the biggest reason is that inmates are much more willing to test female guards. "Testing" involves intimidation, trying to bribe them, seducing them, harassing them, etc. A male guard commands a certain amount of respect simply by existing that a female guard does not get. My friend's brother summarizes it by saying, "A male guard can point to the rules and say, "Sorry, just doing my job," and an inmate will understand that it's the Man keeping him down and not the man. A female guard, because she's perceived as weaker, doesn't get that ability. Prisoners think they can get away with it because the woman isn't going to enforce the rules." From this, he asserts that the ideal male guard is an unthinking robot. "Sorry, you have violated Rule 21. I have to write you up. No exceptions." Meanwhile, an ideal female guard is a "crazy, man-hating, psychotic bitch" who takes sadistic pleasure in making prisoners' lives hell. She won't get any respect otherwise.

Due to most women being decent human beings, this leads to even higher rates of women being compromised compared to men. Whether it's from being intimidated or seduced, women end up giving favors, fucking inmates, or turning a blind eye to drug activity, rape, and violence. Men do it too, (see the "criminals guarding criminals" section) but at lower rates.

3. Due to a variety of factors, including too many prisoners, not enough for them to do, and a pervasive atmosphere of the animals running the zoo, drama is the primary occupation of most of the inmates. After all, they have nothing better to do. So they make excitement. They fuck with guards, fuck with each other, gamble, (which leads to fucking with each other because debts are created) rape each other, try to seduce the female guards, harass the medical staff, do drugs, make bullshit accusations against the prison just because they can, and so on. To counter this, prison staff frequently collaborate with the gang bosses. They tell the gang boss, "Hey, Jerry's being a pain. Can you take care of him for us?" Jerry gets his ass kicked, and the problem goes away. In return, the prison turns a blind eye to the things that the gang boss is doing. This, of course, leads to prison-sanctioned violence and rape.

Fixing this requires a hard look at what we use our prison system for. I think that we use it for far too much. We shouldn't be sentencing minor drug offenders and petty criminals to prison; it overloads the system and turns the place into a teeming madhouse where the prison staff is focused on survival, not actually rehabilitating the inmates.

In combination with this, we need to get better quality guards. Currently, corrections officers are frequently the failures who couldn't become cops. We need to change that by offering competitive pay. Doing this requires the prison system to shrink and become a smaller organization. Prisons should be focused facilities rather than being a Walmart.

Finally, I'd also suggest segregating prisons by race, but all the hippie Integration Uber Alles people would whine about it.

I strongly recommend checking out Dean Spade for more information on this. He has a very detailed book as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk

Hacker News? (Maybe I'm not getting it. That happens a lot.)

Consent is a complicated issue. Inmates in a prison can fully consent, but to determine if they are consenting is beyond even a simple psychological evaluation, and certainly beyond the judgement of a horny guard.

On the other hand, in Aljazeera's home country "sexual assault" is punishable for the victim, and if anything about conservative sharia based marriages holds true in Qatar, most sexual assailants are actually husbands. (Minors can't consent, and having sex with non-consenting minors even if she is married to her assailant is technically called a sexual assault)

To be clear: I'm not overly judging, not calling for action or hatred against the people of Quatar, just pointing out a perspective for Al Jazeera accusing the US. I do think the US needs to get its penal system in shape though, for the benefit of all concerned...