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23 June 2009 2:09 PM
Bounding the Idea of Punishment
At The Corner, Eli Lehrer writes:
It has been far too long in coming but, yesterday, the Federal Prison Rape Elimination commission released its report on elimination and prevention efforts regarding the biggest social problem nobody wants to talk about: prison rape.
Anyone who looks at the problem can't react with anything other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over 60,000 prisoners -- the great bulk of them male -- fall victim to sexual abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are "punks" who are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on end.
The federal report's conclusions -- a zero-tolerance policy, more direct monitoring, and the like -- almost are all common sense. State, local, and federal governments should take immediate legislative and administrative action to implement nearly everything in the report. (Most of the practices are already commonplace in the federal and better-run state systems.) Although giving trial lawyers more business rarely makes sense, Congress may also want to reconsider laws that make it very difficult for prisoners to sue prison authorities absent concrete evidence of physical harm. It's quite possible that many legitimate prison-rape claims get thrown out of court under current laws. And prison rape needs to stop.
But the nation's prison-rape problems can't go away overnight for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly. Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in prison has lead to a widespread attitude that's frankly inhumane. It is one thing to say that prison shouldn't be fun and quite another to say that detainees "deserve" rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.
Read the whole thing -- Mr. Lehrer is absolutely right that prison rape is one of the biggest problems that no one in America wants to talk about. Lots more cameras in jails would help.
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But the cameras would probably be seen as too invasive of privacy....