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

I agree that keeping criminals out of the streets is the first reason. But also to make an example, so future crimes are prevented. Then, while we're at it, rehabilitation.

Punishment is a barbaric way to look at it. Revenge doesn't mix very well with a legal system. (emotions vs objetive POV)

Ugh, I didn't see that post. Implying that the probability that the US government engaged in COINTELPRO is significantly below 1 requires far more paranoia than belief to the contrary, given that the program was exposed, studied and publicly reported on at just about every level of government, and that the FBI itself confirms[1] that COINTELPRO did in fact exist.

Unless you meant the poster on here was saying that you'd have to be paranoid to believe that there is any sort of modern form of COINTELPRO. We are quickly going into the unknowable (to outsiders) and therefore faith-based, but certainly I wouldn't call it crazy to think that the US government might be engaging in some sort of covert operations today that are similar to covert-but-exposed operations from 40 years ago. To rule that out as inconceivable or stupid requires quite a lot of faith.

The DoJ itself has called various 21st FBI investigations of political dissidents troubling or improper[2]. And as far as I know, not one person in the FBI even so much as lost their job over COINTELPRO, so I'm not sure how one could suggest that we live in a world today where COINTELPRO-like programs simply couldn't exist. Of course the tactics would be different today, but that's probably more a reflection of the fact that technology enables all sorts of surveillance that wouldn't have been imaginable decades ago, than any sort of fundamental shift in what is or isn't considered reasonable or possible by the top echelons of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

[1] http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_oper...

Well, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, so I'll just list some random quotes from the article.

> With the ease of ordering takeout, White used a smuggled cellphone to arrange exchanges between outside drug dealers and corrections officers, who brought the contraband to him to be sold inside the jail at huge markups, the affidavit alleged. Percocet went for $30 a pill; one-gram bags of marijuana sold for $50. The gang’s control was so complete that any non-member who tried to get in on the action had to pay a tax or risk physical harm.

> Thirteen of them [the female prison guards] allegedly smuggled cellphones and drugs inside their hair, lunches and underwear for the man they called “Bulldog” or “Tay.” One tattooed his name on her neck, another on her wrist. Four have carried his children.

> Documents that investigators recovered from the Black Guerrilla Family detail how its new members are taught to target specific officers. Look for women, they are told, with “low self-esteem, insecurities, and certain physical attributes.”

> Jon Galley, a top Maryland corrections official, said he likes to show trainees a copy of a how-to guide, confiscated from an inmate’s cell, that lays out how to win over guards. The two pages of tips include dropping a “kite,” or love note, confessing to the officer that the inmate “felt a connection to her, that she was beautiful.”

> officials would “turn a blind eye to contraband smuggling and actively protect White and the [Black Guerilla Family] by warning them of investigations,” according to the affidavit. One such warning allegedly came from Tiffany Linder, who had worked at Wal-Mart and Panera, her uncle said, before she was hired to be a guard three years ago. Investigators say the pregnant guard alerted White in January that cells were going to be searched.

> In one taped conversation, White boasted that he made $15,800 that month, less than normal. “This is my jail. You understand that?” he said to a friend. “I’m dead serious. . . . I make every final call in this jail. . . . Everything come to me.”

White ("the prisoner") is the victim here?

Well, there's punishment and there's "punishment". I think if you ask most sane minded fair persons they'd say that punishment would entail having your freedoms curtailed, being removed from society, having access to friends/family/associates controlled and restricted - i.e. loss of liberty.

However during this period of incarceration, prisoners have a right not to be physically and mentally abused by their fellow inmates and jailers. Incarceration is the punishment, not beatings and rapes.

As to the killing of death row prisoners, their punishment involves not just the loss of their liberty, but also their loss of the right to live the remainder of their natural lives. But it does not give the state the right to make participant endure several minutes of deliberate and avoidable excruciating pain whilst being put to death. I'm fairly certain your justice system doesn't codify that kind of barbarism as part of the death sentence.

If The Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland can provide pain free assisted suicides then surely it's possible to kill death row prisoners just as humanely in the US.

You seem dead set on saying "Well, guards exchanged other perks for the sex, therefore it wasn't rape!"

Which entirely misunderstands what rape is. It's about consent, or lack thereof. Would the guards have been in a position to have sex with him if not for the position of power they were placed in over him? No. Simply because he adopted very successful survival tactics to leverage the sex they were exacting from him doesn't change the fact he had no real ability to consent.

It does move toward a bit of a gray area here, because of possible pressure gangs exerted outside the prison. But that makes it even more rapey--if pressure were really being exerted in that way, both people involved were victims of sexual violence. This kind of sexual relationship is not something to glorify or excuse, and the implicit "go for it dude!" shows a great lack of empathy for his situation.