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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

#31

Post by wlievens »

joshfraser wrote: post #18

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 represent…

To better picture the severity of that normalisation, just reverse the genders and imagine a TV show where a male inspector threatens a female suspect with prison rape...

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

#32

Post by scarmig »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #30
scarmig wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effec…

It works exactly as it's supposed to: as the primary instrument of white supremacy in a war against racial minorities. That's why the Drug War figures so prominently in explaining why we have a higher rate of imprisonment than any other country in the world, and why minorities are so disproportionately targeted in the drug war for petty offenses like using and selling crack (despite it being less pure than coke) or marijuana (itself a term that Anslinger brought to prominence in the 1930's to racialize the drug and the war against it).

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

#33

Post by hueving »

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…

> female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense

Wrong person being raped. It's always the guard doing the 'raping' because of the power at play. Even if the prisoner consents, it may have been under a lot of pressure to avoid problems with the guard later.

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

#34

Post by hessenwolf »

valleyer wrote: post #29
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.

When they forcibly lock their children in with murderers, they are held liable.

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

#35

Post by thaumasiotes »

hueving wrote: post #33
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…

> female guards falling in love with inmates and sleeping with them are not being "raped" in any conventional sense Wrong person being raped. It's always the guard doing the 'raping' because of the power at play. Even if the prisoner consents, it may have been under a lot of pressure to avoid problems with the guard later.

>> are not being "raped" in any conventional sense, and neither are the prisoners (who are the notional victims)

Finish the sentence before commenting on it, maybe?

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

#37

Post by tobiasu »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #28

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 actual…

The author (https://twitter.com/marisahtaylor) looks as American as it gets. Your smoke screen in the form of Quatar criticism is pathetic.

Look! The leader of the free world is better than North Korea. Everyone should shut up and be happy. Ridiculous.

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

#38

Post by InclinedPlane »

scarmig wrote: post #32
InclinedPlane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effec…

It works exactly as it's supposed to: as the primary instrument of white supremacy in a war against racial minorities. That's why the Drug War figures so prominently in explaining why we have a higher rate of imprisonment than any other country in the world, and why minorities are so disproportionately targeted in the drug war for petty offenses like using and selling crack (despite it being less pure than coke) or m…

In practice it may work out that way, but I don't believe that the majority of actors within the criminal justice system are acting in bad faith or are intentionally advancing a racist agenda. Indeed, many LEOs are racial minorities.

I don't think it's helpful to characterize the actions of officers or DAs as racist per se but rather to point to the racist consequences of drug laws, LEO behavior, and so on. I think the number of people within the system acting in good faith far outweigh the number of bad actors and if we desire change it'll be easier if we can convince such folks into coming to "our side" rather than vilifying them.

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

#39

Post by andyjohnson0 »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #28

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 actual…

"...Al Jazeera accusing the US"

Al Jazeera aren't accusing the US of anything. They are simply reporting the contents of a report [1] published by the US Department of Justice. The accusation is coming from the US Government, not Quatar.

[1] http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4881

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

#40

Post by blueskin_ »

adaml_623 wrote: post #36

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

So should police, etc. Footage automatically goes both to the police force, a neutral third party, and the the ACLU/whatever equivalent, so as to avoid any accusation of 'missing' footage.
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