US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
america.aljazeera.com
US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
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Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#2[deleted]
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#3It 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.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#4I 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.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#5It 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 durin…
Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#6Hacker News? (Maybe I'm not getting it. That happens a lot.)
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#7American 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.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#8Hacker News? (Maybe I'm not getting it. That happens a lot.)
Considering the negative connotations of the word "hacker" in the justice system, what with the federal penitentiaries and all, this news is relevant.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#9It 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 durin…
Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.
True, in fact many states have laws that call it rape, no matter if any consent was given.
On the other hand, you have men locked away for decades and willing female guards.
Re: US Government: Guards may be responsible for half of prison sex assaults
#10I 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.
Modern prisons are, ironically enough, reverse panopticons. Governments do very little to monitor and protect the people it's placed under bodily control, even going so far as to create vast dark privatized spaces where it can maintain a careful ignorance of all the horrible things that go on in them.