Why We Let Prison Rape Go On

nytimes.com

25 points·klenwell··6 comments

Americans as a group seem to view ever-harsher conditions in prison and after release as being a necessary disincentive for criminal behaviour. Sexual assault in prison and its tacit support amongst the general population seems to me to just be another part of this "hang em high" mentality - how often do you hear people joking about dropping the soap or "sharing a cell with Bubba" when talking about criminals?

The fact that this sort of approach to criminality drives up recidivism does not ever seem to enter the conversation, with the possible exception of places like HN or Metafilter or other liberal-by-American-standards forums.

Most people aren't ever arrested, so they mistakenly believe that prison violence only happens to murderers and rapists.

They don't understand that your teenage son can get raped while in an overnight holding cell for unpaid parking tickets (yes, this has actually happened.)

It even happened the other night on The Nightly Show - an otherwise wildly liberal show opened their panel with a recommendation that Tsarnaev should be raped in prison.

The amount of vengeance in the american system, at the total exclusion of anything else disgusts me. See-also the torture that is super-max [1].

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-t...

White males being raped in prison does not figure very high in the liberal agenda. The prison rape elimination act was a result of lobbying by conservative and Christian groups.

Additionally, prison rape actually makes a prison stay easier for those who benefit from it––the rapists themselves, who are generally much more hardened criminals than their victims.

This - and why do you let unjustified highest incarceration rates go on?

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