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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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.

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.

Most countries don’t have prison rape.

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

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

/images/1679220790917088.webp

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.

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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