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

america.aljazeera.com

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

#21

Post by tunesmith »

steve19 wrote: post #12
dpeck wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.

I am in no way in favor of staff-inmate relationships, but in most relationships the power dynamic is uneven. For example, in most marriages with children the breadwinner has significantly more power, but that does not make sex an assault.

Re-read your statement and replace "staff-inmate" with "adult-child" or "fratboy-unconsciousgirl" and see how it sounds.

Taking this charitably, I would agree with you that in general, sex might still be consensual even if there is some degree of subjective power imbalance between two people. rockstar-fan. politician-staffmember.

However, this does not mean that all power-imbalanced sex is consensual. teacher-underagestudent. undertaker-corpse.

(Strange things can happen when you mix up "there exists" and "for all"...)

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

#22

Post by scarmig »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
pmorici wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a new Netflix series out called "Orange is the New Black" based on a true life story of a woman who gets sent to prison for being a drug mule for her lesbian lover and only gets caught many years later when she is leading a normal suburban life. At any rate, one of the plot lines is about a relationship between a prison guard and one of the female inmates. It comes up in the course of events that basically a…

To my knowledge, it is generally true that sexual contact between an inmate and a prison guard is legally rape no matter whether consensual or not. This is a kludge in the law; obviously, female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense, and neither are the prisoners (who are the notional victims). However... we definitely do want to criminalize that co…

There's some small bit of gray area here, but I think most of those situations should still qualify as rape.

Prison guards have immense power over inmates. Their decisions can give a prisoner a plush gig or a terrible one; can allow for the prisoner to receive medical care or not; can result in a prisoner being punished severely for an infraction or escape with just a slap on the wrist or even nothing at all. The discretion of prison guards can even determine whether a prisoner will have the opportunity to be raped by another prisoner or not, or determine whether the prisoner ends up the sexual property of a nice owner or a brutal one.

In those circumstances, it's incredibly problematic to say that the prisoner had free choice in the matter: it's akin to asking a woman to have sex with you and at the same time off-handedly mentioning how unfortunate it'd be if she made you angry. It's a choice without a real choice.

The idea that men cannot be raped while being the penetrator is one that has to go.

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

#23

Post by icambron »

tunesmith wrote: post #21
steve19 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in no way in favor of staff-inmate relationships, but in most relationships the power dynamic is uneven. For example, in most marriages with children the breadwinner has significantly more power, but that does not make sex an assault.

Re-read your statement and replace "staff-inmate" with "adult-child" or "fratboy-unconsciousgirl" and see how it sounds. Taking this charitably, I would agree with you that in general, sex might still be consensual even if there is some degree of subjective power imbalance between two people. rockstar-fan. politician-staffmember. However, this does not mean that all power-imbalanced sex is consensual. teacher-underag…

Indeed. There are actually two things to consider here:

* The amount of power imbalance. A husband or wife can always get divorced, a staffer can quit (though we shouldn't trivialize this and it's exactly why sexual harassment laws exist), and a rockstar can go home. It's not, relatively, nearly as big a power delta as the one between a prisoner and those who imprison him. Hard to think of a bigger power difference, actually.

* The kind of power. The power being wielded by prison staff is violent coercive power. They can throw the prisoner into solitary or just beat him (or, if the staffer isn't actually a guard, they have access to people who are). In fact, that coercive power is what keeps the prisoner in prison in the first place.

Between those two things, it's really hard to see how a staff/inmate relationship can be consensual. "You want to do this, right? You know that being in a position to hurt you is literally my job, right? Oh good."

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

#24

Post by thaumasiotes »

scarmig wrote: post #22
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my knowledge, it is generally true that sexual contact between an inmate and a prison guard is legally rape no matter whether consensual or not. This is a kludge in the law; obviously, female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense, and neither are the prisoners (who are the notional victims). However... we definitely do want to criminalize that co…

There's some small bit of gray area here, but I think most of those situations should still qualify as rape. Prison guards have immense power over inmates. Their decisions can give a prisoner a plush gig or a terrible one; can allow for the prisoner to receive medical care or not; can result in a prisoner being punished severely for an infraction or escape with just a slap on the wrist or even nothing at all. The dis…

Did you read the article I linked? It talks about a prisoner who impregnated four of his guards, who then bragged to each other about having his kids. How one of the guards went to the guy for moral support when she found the prison environment too disturbing to handle. How the prisoners passed around tips on seducing the guards. These were not guards with any power over the inmates.

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

#26

Post by PhasmaFelis »

calroc wrote: post #6

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

As the internet is pretty much constantly under attack by voyeuristic and censorious governments, civil rights are a matter of close interest to hackers. This spills over into civil-rights issues not directly related to the internet.

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

#27

Post by InclinedPlane »

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.

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

#28

Post by bayesianhorse »

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...

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

#29

Post by valleyer »

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #25

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.

Counterexample: parents aren't in general held liable for the murder of their children.

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

#30

Post by InclinedPlane »

scarmig wrote: post #10
sdegutis wrote: post #4

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.

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.

And this is by, at least implicit, intent. Prison in the US fits into a punitive, even retributional model. If you hurt society you get hurt in return. If you do something bad you get punished. Fear and rememberance of punishment is what keeps people in line. In such a model it's undesirable for prison conditions to be mild or tolerable, the more intolerable and brutal the better, because that makes them a more effective punishment.

It's a model that has continued to be used in the American justice system for centuries, but it's not a system based on any scientific principles. Worse, it doesn't actually work. As often as not prison breeds worse criminals rather than keeping people on the straight and narrow.

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