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

158 points by GuiA 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eurleif 13y ago
It 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.
- dpeck 13y ago
  Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.
  - FrankCastello 13y ago
    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.
  - steve19 13y ago
    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.
    - streetnigga 13y ago
      When the bread-winner imprisons his/her partner that is considered a crime. Lets not start with crappy analogies. edit: Bring a response instead of a down-vote. This community's weak point is when discussion is put to the wayside in favor of a quick and easy up or down vote. More to the point: Eff off anonymous down-voters, a prison guard is not a bread winner in a sexual assault relationship. This is just a really bad analogy that shouldn't be given support.
    - tunesmith 13y ago
      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"...)
      - icambron 13y ago
        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."
- streetnigga 13y ago
  This brings up the question, how can a relationship be considered willing when the person is imprisoned against their will? Let's see the numbers for those released that continue the relationship, call THAT consensual instead. What the article speaks of is sexual assault.
- pmorici 13y ago
  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 any relations between a guard and a prison inmate are considered rape because you can't consent when you are in prison to someone who has power over you. Sort of how a minor can't consent even when another minor is involved. Apparently it is illegal under any circumstance between a guard and inmate as a matter of law in all 50 states as of 2006. http://www.7dvt.com/2013prison-guards-pregnancy-tests-vermont-law-prohibiting-officer-inmate-sex http://www.7dvt.com/2013prison-guards-pregnancy-tests-vermon...
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    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 conduct, and should be punishing it much more than we actually do; those guards are not on our side; they are on the criminal's side and routinely compromise the security of the prison. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-jail-case-depicts-a-corrupt-culture-driven-by-drugs-money-and-sex/2013/05/04/d0cde8a6-b33f-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-jail-case-depi...
    - scarmig 13y ago
      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.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Or it's because of the massive sexist cultural bias against female-on-male rape.
sdegutis 13y ago
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.
- scarmig 13y ago
  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.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    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.
    - scarmig 13y ago
      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).
calroc 13y ago
Hacker News? (Maybe I'm not getting it. That happens a lot.)
- streetnigga 13y ago
  Considering the negative connotations of the word "hacker" in the justice system, what with the federal penitentiaries and all, this news is relevant.
  - calroc 13y ago
    Ah, I'll buy that. Thanks.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  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.
scarmig 13y ago
American 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
joshfraser 13y ago
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 represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized." http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...
- wlievens 13y ago
  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...
- brc 13y ago
  I remember reading that piece when it came out. I've never made a prison rape joke since, and I always am willing to be the person who makes an uncomfortable pause to hose down someone prison rape joke. Racist and gay hatreds found their support in 'harmless' jokes, and for that to change, the jokes had to change. People still tell prison rape jokes (and include in plotlines) where they would never use a racist or homophobic joke. So the best way forwards to work against the prison rape meme is to be that person who says 'well, I don't find jokes about rape funny at all.' You'll get rolled eyes and mutterings behind your back, but people will look back at this period and wonder why this was such a big public joke instead of a terrible injustice.
BrandonRead 13y ago
I strongly recommend checking out Dean Spade for more information on this. He has a very detailed book as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
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.
- valleyer 13y ago
  Counterexample: parents aren't in general held liable for the murder of their children.
  - hessenwolf 13y ago
    When they forcibly lock their children in with murderers, they are held liable.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
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.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
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...
- tobiasu 13y ago
  The author (https://twitter.com/marisahtaylor 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.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    Calling someone on hypocrisy does not imply asking him to shut up.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  "...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 http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4881
adaml_623 13y ago
So we are all agreed that all prison guards should wear cameras that record 100% of the time that they are inside the prison?
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  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.
yeukhon 13y ago
After watching "Orange is the new black" I thought prison was a really really dark place. Sexual assault is probably worse than worrying about next guy stab you. While reading this article, I entertained the possibility of robot guards. The only problem is that prisoners can break them or alert the robots. Any idea how to keep these robots safe?
- corobo 13y ago
  Deploy more robots! For every robot that is damaged send out two to replace it, one in a "get the job done" mode and the other in a "cover that guy" mode
summerdown2 13y ago
Uk point of view here. I have no understanding what Americans want out of the prison system. This was brought home to me when I watched (ex UK minister) Micheal Portillo's programme on Death Row. He is a believer in the death penalty, but went through the programme appalled by the torment suffered by prisoners. During the programme he researched, and found, a humane way of killing a prisoner. Then, he took it to a leading advocate of capital punishment in America, only to be told it wasn't painful enough. Like I say, I have no understanding of this attitude, but I suspect the prison rape issue in the US won't change until the majority of people get past the idea that the prime thing to do to criminals is punishment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY
- genieyclo 13y ago
  If the point of prison for criminals isn't punishment, then what is it?
  - coldpie 13y ago
    To keep them out of general society. Possibly to put them in a situation where they can be reformed to rejoin society. Setting aside ethics entirely, prisons cost resources and also take human resources out of society. It's in society's best interest to reform a prisoner and release them ASAP, provided the reform works and they are no longer a danger to society. Obviously there's a lot of vague terms and wiggle room in that paragraph, but there's certainly a purpose to prisons aside from punishment.
    - narag 13y ago
      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)
  - eonwe 13y ago
    One goal for prisons could be rehabilitation?
Zigurd 13y ago
Some commenter here recently compared the likelihood there was a COINTELPRO-like operation in our DoJ to space aliens, implying that only stupid and paranoid people could believe such a thing. Some people here are entirely too impressed with helping catch "bad guys" and need to put away their Cracker Jack badges and realize they are part of the problem. This is the system that Manning and Assange and Snowden face. If you think they are cowards, think again. If you think Swartz was a coward, shame on you.
- dannypgh 13y ago
  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 http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_oper...
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    So, what are you saying? 1. We're so much cleaner it couldn't happen again 2. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme I'll go with #2
pessimizer 13y ago
Guards and administration are also responsible for some portion of inmate-on-inmate sex assaults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail_experiences_and_aftermath_.281973.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail... "On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained: "'I also was protesting against the bail system, under which the privileged, the white, the middle class escape the pre-trial confinements which go automatically to the poor and black. In good conscience I could not take advantage of the privileges available to me. "'Even in jail, however, I could not escape those privileges. I was sent directly to cell block four, third floor — the privileged area where I could and did play chess with Gordon Liddy, where one-man rooms for 45 respectable prisoners were never locked.' "Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he heard that Donaldson worked for The Washington Post and, suspected him of being in prison 'to try to steal a march[(?)]' on Woodward and Bernstein by getting a first hand story", and expressed the wish that he be transferred elsewhere. "However, Donaldson himself in 'The Punk Who Wouldn't Shut Up', states that guard captain Clinton Cobb had him moved to the most dangerous cell-block in the prison and his subsequent rapes arranged as he believed him to be writing a piece on prison corruption for The Washington Post. "That night, Donaldson was lured into a cell by a prisoner who claimed that he and his friends wanted to 'discuss pacifism' with him in their cells. He was then anally and orally raped dozens of times by an estimated 45 male inmates. He suffered additional abuse a second night before he escaped from his tormentors (two of whom were pimping him to the others for cigarettes) and collapsed, sobbing, at the cell block gate where guards retrieved him. After a midnight examination at D.C. General Hospital (during which he remained handcuffed) he was returned to the jail hospital, untreated either for physical injury or emotional trauma. "Donaldson later claimed that the guards told him he'd been deliberately set up by Captain Cobb. The following morning, Lucy Witt, one of the White House Seven, posted his bond and took him to a doctor."
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Thanks for the link. What a fascinating man.
omegaham 13y ago
A few things. My girlfriend is a prison nurse, and a good friend's brother is a CO at another prison. 1. The population of guards is pretty bad. The job pays approximately $shit, (Good overtime possibilities, though) and the staff's quality suffers as a result. Frequently, you end up with criminals guarding the criminals. Said guards are often compromised and either become indifferent to criminal behavior or actively aid it. 2. Female guards perform poorly compared to male guards. This is due to a variety of things, but the biggest reason is that inmates are much more willing to test female guards. "Testing" involves intimidation, trying to bribe them, seducing them, harassing them, etc. A male guard commands a certain amount of respect simply by existing that a female guard does not get. My friend's brother summarizes it by saying, "A male guard can point to the rules and say, "Sorry, just doing my job," and an inmate will understand that it's the Man keeping him down and not the man. A female guard, because she's perceived as weaker, doesn't get that ability. Prisoners think they can get away with it because the woman isn't going to enforce the rules." From this, he asserts that the ideal male guard is an unthinking robot. "Sorry, you have violated Rule 21. I have to write you up. No exceptions." Meanwhile, an ideal female guard is a "crazy, man-hating, psychotic bitch" who takes sadistic pleasure in making prisoners' lives hell. She won't get any respect otherwise. Due to most women being decent human beings, this leads to even higher rates of women being compromised compared to men. Whether it's from being intimidated or seduced, women end up giving favors, fucking inmates, or turning a blind eye to drug activity, rape, and violence. Men do it too, (see the "criminals guarding criminals" section) but at lower rates. 3. Due to a variety of factors, including too many prisoners, not enough for them to do, and a pervasive atmosphere of the animals running the zoo, drama is the primary occupation of most of the inmates. After all, they have nothing better to do. So they make excitement. They fuck with guards, fuck with each other, gamble, (which leads to fucking with each other because debts are created) rape each other, try to seduce the female guards, harass the medical staff, do drugs, make bullshit accusations against the prison just because they can, and so on. To counter this, prison staff frequently collaborate with the gang bosses. They tell the gang boss, "Hey, Jerry's being a pain. Can you take care of him for us?" Jerry gets his ass kicked, and the problem goes away. In return, the prison turns a blind eye to the things that the gang boss is doing. This, of course, leads to prison-sanctioned violence and rape. Fixing this requires a hard look at what we use our prison system for. I think that we use it for far too much. We shouldn't be sentencing minor drug offenders and petty criminals to prison; it overloads the system and turns the place into a teeming madhouse where the prison staff is focused on survival, not actually rehabilitating the inmates. In combination with this, we need to get better quality guards. Currently, corrections officers are frequently the failures who couldn't become cops. We need to change that by offering competitive pay. Doing this requires the prison system to shrink and become a smaller organization. Prisons should be focused facilities rather than being a Walmart. Finally, I'd also suggest segregating prisons by race, but all the hippie Integration Uber Alles people would whine about it.

158 points by GuiA 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

It 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.

dpeck 13y ago
Consensual may not actually be given the power dynamics involved.
- FrankCastello 13y ago
  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.
- steve19 13y ago
  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.
  - streetnigga 13y ago
    When the bread-winner imprisons his/her partner that is considered a crime. Lets not start with crappy analogies. edit: Bring a response instead of a down-vote. This community's weak point is when discussion is put to the wayside in favor of a quick and easy up or down vote. More to the point: Eff off anonymous down-voters, a prison guard is not a bread winner in a sexual assault relationship. This is just a really bad analogy that shouldn't be given support.
  - tunesmith 13y ago
    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"...)
    - icambron 13y ago
      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."
streetnigga 13y ago
This brings up the question, how can a relationship be considered willing when the person is imprisoned against their will? Let's see the numbers for those released that continue the relationship, call THAT consensual instead. What the article speaks of is sexual assault.
pmorici 13y ago
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 any relations between a guard and a prison inmate are considered rape because you can't consent when you are in prison to someone who has power over you. Sort of how a minor can't consent even when another minor is involved. Apparently it is illegal under any circumstance between a guard and inmate as a matter of law in all 50 states as of 2006. http://www.7dvt.com/2013prison-guards-pregnancy-tests-vermont-law-prohibiting-officer-inmate-sex http://www.7dvt.com/2013prison-guards-pregnancy-tests-vermon...
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  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 conduct, and should be punishing it much more than we actually do; those guards are not on our side; they are on the criminal's side and routinely compromise the security of the prison. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-jail-case-depicts-a-corrupt-culture-driven-by-drugs-money-and-sex/2013/05/04/d0cde8a6-b33f-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-jail-case-depi...
  - scarmig 13y ago
    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.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Or it's because of the massive sexist cultural bias against female-on-male rape.

sdegutis 13y ago

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.

scarmig 13y ago
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.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  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.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    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).

calroc 13y ago

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

streetnigga 13y ago
Considering the negative connotations of the word "hacker" in the justice system, what with the federal penitentiaries and all, this news is relevant.
- calroc 13y ago
  Ah, I'll buy that. Thanks.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
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.

scarmig 13y ago

American 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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

joshfraser 13y ago

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 represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized." http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120...

wlievens 13y ago
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...
brc 13y ago
I remember reading that piece when it came out. I've never made a prison rape joke since, and I always am willing to be the person who makes an uncomfortable pause to hose down someone prison rape joke. Racist and gay hatreds found their support in 'harmless' jokes, and for that to change, the jokes had to change. People still tell prison rape jokes (and include in plotlines) where they would never use a racist or homophobic joke. So the best way forwards to work against the prison rape meme is to be that person who says 'well, I don't find jokes about rape funny at all.' You'll get rolled eyes and mutterings behind your back, but people will look back at this period and wonder why this was such a big public joke instead of a terrible injustice.

BrandonRead 13y ago

I strongly recommend checking out Dean Spade for more information on this. He has a very detailed book as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYxqD1aElk

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

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.

valleyer 13y ago
Counterexample: parents aren't in general held liable for the murder of their children.
- hessenwolf 13y ago
  When they forcibly lock their children in with murderers, they are held liable.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

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.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

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...

tobiasu 13y ago
The author (https://twitter.com/marisahtaylor 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.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  Calling someone on hypocrisy does not imply asking him to shut up.
andyjohnson0 13y ago
"...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 http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4881

adaml_623 13y ago

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

blueskin_ 13y ago
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.

yeukhon 13y ago

After watching "Orange is the new black" I thought prison was a really really dark place. Sexual assault is probably worse than worrying about next guy stab you. While reading this article, I entertained the possibility of robot guards. The only problem is that prisoners can break them or alert the robots. Any idea how to keep these robots safe?

corobo 13y ago
Deploy more robots! For every robot that is damaged send out two to replace it, one in a "get the job done" mode and the other in a "cover that guy" mode

summerdown2 13y ago

Uk point of view here. I have no understanding what Americans want out of the prison system. This was brought home to me when I watched (ex UK minister) Micheal Portillo's programme on Death Row. He is a believer in the death penalty, but went through the programme appalled by the torment suffered by prisoners. During the programme he researched, and found, a humane way of killing a prisoner. Then, he took it to a leading advocate of capital punishment in America, only to be told it wasn't painful enough. Like I say, I have no understanding of this attitude, but I suspect the prison rape issue in the US won't change until the majority of people get past the idea that the prime thing to do to criminals is punishment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY

genieyclo 13y ago
If the point of prison for criminals isn't punishment, then what is it?
- coldpie 13y ago
  To keep them out of general society. Possibly to put them in a situation where they can be reformed to rejoin society. Setting aside ethics entirely, prisons cost resources and also take human resources out of society. It's in society's best interest to reform a prisoner and release them ASAP, provided the reform works and they are no longer a danger to society. Obviously there's a lot of vague terms and wiggle room in that paragraph, but there's certainly a purpose to prisons aside from punishment.
  - narag 13y ago
    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)
- eonwe 13y ago
  One goal for prisons could be rehabilitation?

Zigurd 13y ago

Some commenter here recently compared the likelihood there was a COINTELPRO-like operation in our DoJ to space aliens, implying that only stupid and paranoid people could believe such a thing. Some people here are entirely too impressed with helping catch "bad guys" and need to put away their Cracker Jack badges and realize they are part of the problem. This is the system that Manning and Assange and Snowden face. If you think they are cowards, think again. If you think Swartz was a coward, shame on you.

dannypgh 13y ago
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 http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_oper...
- Zigurd 13y ago
  So, what are you saying? 1. We're so much cleaner it couldn't happen again 2. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme I'll go with #2

pessimizer 13y ago

Guards and administration are also responsible for some portion of inmate-on-inmate sex assaults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail_experiences_and_aftermath_.281973.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_the_Punk#Washington_jail... "On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained: "'I also was protesting against the bail system, under which the privileged, the white, the middle class escape the pre-trial confinements which go automatically to the poor and black. In good conscience I could not take advantage of the privileges available to me. "'Even in jail, however, I could not escape those privileges. I was sent directly to cell block four, third floor — the privileged area where I could and did play chess with Gordon Liddy, where one-man rooms for 45 respectable prisoners were never locked.' "Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he heard that Donaldson worked for The Washington Post and, suspected him of being in prison 'to try to steal a march[(?)]' on Woodward and Bernstein by getting a first hand story", and expressed the wish that he be transferred elsewhere. "However, Donaldson himself in 'The Punk Who Wouldn't Shut Up', states that guard captain Clinton Cobb had him moved to the most dangerous cell-block in the prison and his subsequent rapes arranged as he believed him to be writing a piece on prison corruption for The Washington Post. "That night, Donaldson was lured into a cell by a prisoner who claimed that he and his friends wanted to 'discuss pacifism' with him in their cells. He was then anally and orally raped dozens of times by an estimated 45 male inmates. He suffered additional abuse a second night before he escaped from his tormentors (two of whom were pimping him to the others for cigarettes) and collapsed, sobbing, at the cell block gate where guards retrieved him. After a midnight examination at D.C. General Hospital (during which he remained handcuffed) he was returned to the jail hospital, untreated either for physical injury or emotional trauma. "Donaldson later claimed that the guards told him he'd been deliberately set up by Captain Cobb. The following morning, Lucy Witt, one of the White House Seven, posted his bond and took him to a doctor."

jessaustin 13y ago
Thanks for the link. What a fascinating man.

omegaham 13y ago

A few things. My girlfriend is a prison nurse, and a good friend's brother is a CO at another prison. 1. The population of guards is pretty bad. The job pays approximately $shit, (Good overtime possibilities, though) and the staff's quality suffers as a result. Frequently, you end up with criminals guarding the criminals. Said guards are often compromised and either become indifferent to criminal behavior or actively aid it. 2. Female guards perform poorly compared to male guards. This is due to a variety of things, but the biggest reason is that inmates are much more willing to test female guards. "Testing" involves intimidation, trying to bribe them, seducing them, harassing them, etc. A male guard commands a certain amount of respect simply by existing that a female guard does not get. My friend's brother summarizes it by saying, "A male guard can point to the rules and say, "Sorry, just doing my job," and an inmate will understand that it's the Man keeping him down and not the man. A female guard, because she's perceived as weaker, doesn't get that ability. Prisoners think they can get away with it because the woman isn't going to enforce the rules." From this, he asserts that the ideal male guard is an unthinking robot. "Sorry, you have violated Rule 21. I have to write you up. No exceptions." Meanwhile, an ideal female guard is a "crazy, man-hating, psychotic bitch" who takes sadistic pleasure in making prisoners' lives hell. She won't get any respect otherwise. Due to most women being decent human beings, this leads to even higher rates of women being compromised compared to men. Whether it's from being intimidated or seduced, women end up giving favors, fucking inmates, or turning a blind eye to drug activity, rape, and violence. Men do it too, (see the "criminals guarding criminals" section) but at lower rates. 3. Due to a variety of factors, including too many prisoners, not enough for them to do, and a pervasive atmosphere of the animals running the zoo, drama is the primary occupation of most of the inmates. After all, they have nothing better to do. So they make excitement. They fuck with guards, fuck with each other, gamble, (which leads to fucking with each other because debts are created) rape each other, try to seduce the female guards, harass the medical staff, do drugs, make bullshit accusations against the prison just because they can, and so on. To counter this, prison staff frequently collaborate with the gang bosses. They tell the gang boss, "Hey, Jerry's being a pain. Can you take care of him for us?" Jerry gets his ass kicked, and the problem goes away. In return, the prison turns a blind eye to the things that the gang boss is doing. This, of course, leads to prison-sanctioned violence and rape. Fixing this requires a hard look at what we use our prison system for. I think that we use it for far too much. We shouldn't be sentencing minor drug offenders and petty criminals to prison; it overloads the system and turns the place into a teeming madhouse where the prison staff is focused on survival, not actually rehabilitating the inmates. In combination with this, we need to get better quality guards. Currently, corrections officers are frequently the failures who couldn't become cops. We need to change that by offering competitive pay. Doing this requires the prison system to shrink and become a smaller organization. Prisons should be focused facilities rather than being a Walmart. Finally, I'd also suggest segregating prisons by race, but all the hippie Integration Uber Alles people would whine about it.