Crapola, I say.
In another forum recently, I noticed people alluding to prison rape as an acceptable result of being put into prison, and that anyone who commits a crime deserves what they get.
Doesn’t rape fall under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment? Doesn’t permitting rape in prison, make rape a de facto punishment for just about any and every crime. Escaping that punishment is dependent on the given inmate's toughness, and avoiding that punishment frequently turns an otherwise relatively mild-mannered convict into a much more dangerous person. (What makes the whole thing even more absurd is that the inmates most likely to be victimized by rapists are usually the least likely to be "deserving", if we are measuring by the severity or violence of the crime committed by the victim/inmate.)
It seems sick, twisted and simply wrong to take the attitude that anyone who commits a crime deserves to be raped, or that it's acceptable that they be raped.
The founder of Stop Prisoner Rape was a perfect example of why tolerating prison rape is barbaric, and his experience seems to undercut any claim we might make to being champions of judicial fairness or human rights. He was arrested for unlawful assembly at a Quaker Pray-In anti-war demonstration, didn't pay the bail out of principal, and ultimately ended up being raped 60 times in a two-day period. I hate to use a “story” instead of a cite, but a high school friend of mine embezzled $16 from his employer when he was 17 years old, and because he was unprotected from rape in the adult prison he was sent to, ended up committing murder.
It's time we stopped bredding criminals in our prisons. It's time we started trying to help the helpable become decent members of society instead of hopeless victims and degenerates that are virtually guaranteed to become even more villainous than before they went in.
Peace.
In another forum recently, I noticed people alluding to prison rape as an acceptable result of being put into prison, and that anyone who commits a crime deserves what they get.
Doesn’t rape fall under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment? Doesn’t permitting rape in prison, make rape a de facto punishment for just about any and every crime. Escaping that punishment is dependent on the given inmate's toughness, and avoiding that punishment frequently turns an otherwise relatively mild-mannered convict into a much more dangerous person. (What makes the whole thing even more absurd is that the inmates most likely to be victimized by rapists are usually the least likely to be "deserving", if we are measuring by the severity or violence of the crime committed by the victim/inmate.)
It seems sick, twisted and simply wrong to take the attitude that anyone who commits a crime deserves to be raped, or that it's acceptable that they be raped.
The founder of Stop Prisoner Rape was a perfect example of why tolerating prison rape is barbaric, and his experience seems to undercut any claim we might make to being champions of judicial fairness or human rights. He was arrested for unlawful assembly at a Quaker Pray-In anti-war demonstration, didn't pay the bail out of principal, and ultimately ended up being raped 60 times in a two-day period. I hate to use a “story” instead of a cite, but a high school friend of mine embezzled $16 from his employer when he was 17 years old, and because he was unprotected from rape in the adult prison he was sent to, ended up committing murder.
It's time we stopped bredding criminals in our prisons. It's time we started trying to help the helpable become decent members of society instead of hopeless victims and degenerates that are virtually guaranteed to become even more villainous than before they went in.
Peace.