ONE REASON WHY JURY DUTY IS PROBLEMATIC

I've written before how the last time I was slated to be on a jury, I found myself confronted with an enormous moral dilemma. A recent lawsuit in Texas makes that dilemma all too clear.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Lawsuit focuses on rape in prison

In the 1999 Ruiz ruling on prison reform, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found sexual assault at the time was a pervasive problem in Texas prisons.

In 2001, the Human Rights Watch report No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons found that prison rapes in Texas had reached a crisis.

The ACLU and the California-based group Stop Prison Rape say the system has improved, but they still receive more rape complaints from Texas inmates than from any other state. In 2004, inmates alleged 550 sexual assaults by other inmates in the Texas system.

But Mike Viesca, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman, said Texas prisons have a zero-tolerance policy regarding prison rape.

Click here for the rest.

Yeah. Of course they have a "zero-tolerance policy" about rape in Texas prisons. I guess that's why there were only 550 complaints last year instead of, say, thousands. In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic: it's rather obvious that Texas prison officials only give a shit because they've been under scrutiny about this for the last few years; "zero-tolerance" is simply a show. Meanwhile, prison rape goes on.

Needless to say, the fact that such a phenomenon exists is horrendous at best. Guards can stop this; it's a matter of supervision: clearly, prison officials allow these sexual assaults to happen for their own reasons. And who knows what those reasons are? My best bet is that it's simple sadism. Abu Ghraib was no surprise to me. I already knew how we treat American prisoners--Iraqi prisoners are, apparently, no different.

Consequently, for me, jury service is problematic. If I vote to send a man to prison for whatever crime, there's quite a good chance that I may be sending him to be repeatedly raped by other prisoners while sadistic guards watch. I don't know about you, but I cannot have such an action on my conscience: all individuals should be held accountable for the foreseeable negative consequences of their actions; helping send a man to prison would make me personally responsible if he were raped there. I understand that society has an absolute need to keep criminals off the streets, but until prison life is made more humane, I refuse to play a role in that.

It's not simply rape either. Prisons are plagued by numerous problems which make them dreadful houses of state sanctioned torture. Violence is rampant. Medical care is well below substandard--HIV and hepatitis have much higher infection rates inside than out. Prison "labor" amounts to legalized slavery. Mental illness often goes untreated. And on and on and on. They don't even try to rehabilitate prisoners anymore. Prisons are now places where society simply abuses the convicted, which results in criminals being much more "hardened" when they return to society. I have no idea how this is all supposed to make us all safer.

I won't have anything to do with it.

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