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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25739 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.

According to HRW the problem is due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons (often poorly designed older ones) and a lack of consequences. De facto, lawyers don't want to prosecute prisoners or prisons, they don't feel like there's any good payoff there (especially if they're basically telling prisons they don't know what they're doing). They want to have a cordial relationship with prisons apparently.

Prison guards basically outsource social control to prisoners because they're lazy and don't care. They'll line up 20 people in front of the victim and go 'alright which one was it' - marking the victim as a snitch who recieves worse treatment. It's indirect corporal punishment, like anarcho-tyranny but for prisons (maximum anarchy and maximum tryanny). If they don't like you, they can see to it that Wayne Robertson is your cellmate.

In the worst cases, prisoners are actually placed in the same cell with inmates who are likely to victimize them--sometimes even with inmates who have a demonstrated proclivity for sexually abusing others. The case of Eddie Dillard, a California prisoner who served time at Corcoran State Prison in 1993, is an especially chilling example of this problem. Dillard, a young first-timer who had kicked a female correctional officer, was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, a prisoner known by all as the "Booty Bandit."(412) The skinny Dillard was no match for Robertson, a huge, muscular man serving a life sentence for murder. Not only was Robertson nearly twice Dillard's weight, but he had earned his nickname through his habit of violently raping other prisoners.

Before the end of the day, the inevitable occurred: Robertson beat Dillard into submission and sodomized him. For the next two days, Dillard was raped repeatedly, until finally his cell door was opened and he ran out, refusing to return. A correctional officer who worked on the unit later told the Los Angeles Times: "Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he's raped inmates since."(413) Indeed, according to documents submitted at a California legislative hearing on abuses at Corcoran, Robertson had committed more than a dozen rapes inside Corcoran and other prisons.(414) By placing Dillard in a cell with Robertson, the guards were setting him up for punishment.

Whether as a purposeful act or through mere negligence prisoners are all too often placed together with cellmates who rape them. A Connecticut prisoner told Human Rights Watch how he too was raped by a cellmate with a history of perpetrating rape:

It's mostly incentives. Nobody cares what happens to prisoners, especially at the hand of other prisoners, so if there are benefits to allowing it, it won't be stopped. And there are major benefits to the government for allowing it in general, in addition to all the specific benefits to parts of the system. The prospect of prison rape keeps quite a few Joe Schmos on the straight and narrow.

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