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Another excellent reason why there shouldn't be such laws.
Frankly, I'm not even sure there should be sex-segregated prisons in the first place. A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
In reality, of course, people don't really care about prison rape and abuse when trans people aren't involved. "Don't drop the soap" is a harmless jest, unlike all other rape jokes. But the possibility that a trans person might perpetrate such a crime?
I'm extremely sceptical of the notion that the law should discriminate on the basis of sex or gender at all (isn't Justice blind?), but this particular controversy is missing the key issue.
Sex-segregating the prisons is part of how you keep the prison rape rate as close to zero as possible. This is like "frankly, there shouldn't be seatbelts or airbags. Cars should just not crash". Well, they don't not crash, so seatbelts and airbags are useful. And the rape rate in sex-segregated prisons is still nonzero. If you have some idea about how to make the rape rate zero without sex-segregation ... feel free to propose it.
At the same time, it is true that 'trans rape in prison' is an extremely noncentral objection to trans issues as a whole.
I think "you have standards which allow such things as trans rape in prison" is a fairly central objection, however. The objection is to the unworkable standards; the example of how the standards don't work is not the only case where they don't work.
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Oh sweet, another descent down the slippery slope. From "it's not going to happen" to "we should have never allowed it to not happen" in record time.
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America not being the world, most people do care about prison rape which is why biologically male rapists in women’s prisons is causing so much ire in Scotland.
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It's not just about rape, what happens when a woman serving a long prison term gets pregnant, and the biological father is also serving a long prison term? The solution to this problem is obvious, separate prisoners by biological sex.
Prisoners having sex, especially unprotected sex that leads to childbirth, also isn't a thing that should happen. If it does, there are already procedures for state care of children of unfit parents.
Criminality is heritable, so sex segregating prisoners is a pro eugenic policy. Please don't remove it and add to the foster care system now, and a worse society in the future
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At least the 'just prevent all rape' is somewhat realistic. Keeping men and women in the same location and allowing them some forms of interaction without consensual sex occurring is quite difficult, people really like having sex, unless you sterilize them or forcibly apply birth control and abortion.
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It is simply easier and less burdensome to prevent this in the first place and make this scenario completely impossible to happen, by segregating prisons by sex.
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Abortion.
Sadly no one ever seems to like my legal abortion up to the 360th trimester solution in those cases.
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The level of totalitarian control that would be required for that might mean having to increase the population of prison security guards by multiple orders of magnitude, to the extent that maybe you'd have to have a single guard for each and every prisoner. Engineering that kind of situation seems like a non-trivial economic/political problem. Perhaps with development of AI and robotics, we could use non-human prison guards to make up the numbers, but that's a non-trivial technological problem.
Most countries don’t have prison rape. It’s trivial to fix. Convict the rapist. Allow the taped prisoner to sue the state (why isn’t that happening?). Fire governors who can’t fix this.
How sure are we of that?
A simple google would confirm it. Wiki lists about 5 countries and the other 4 are dictatorships except Turkey which has notoriously bad prisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape
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Us is anomalous in many ways - e.g. the large black and hispanic population, to the relative lack of funding of police forces, etc.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/united-states-underpoliced-overprisoned.html
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For example, a news article from Czech Republic, saying there have been 52 cases investigated in the last 6 years. It also notes that there's supposedly a lot of trust inside prisons between the inmates and the staff, which seems odd but what do I know ?
Could be the case. E.g. with police forces, there are relatively strict psychological testing requirements that filter out a lot of applicants.
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Can’t you get most of the way there with one prisoner per cell and CCTV in communal areas? I agree that is incompatible with the levels of overcrowding in the typical American prison, but it doesn’t require significantly more guards.
Depends on what you mean by "most of the way there," I suppose. If the standard is zero prison rape among all the millions of prisoners in the American system such that even a single rape in there is a failure, that's going to require that those CCTVs have complete coverage of all areas, never break down, and always have competent guards watching. Most likely, you'd also need guards to be watching the guards so that they don't get bribed to look the other way or otherwise compromised. And guards for those guards as well, etc.
Zero is just a very difficult standard to achieve.
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
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