There's Nothing Funny About Prison Rape

From the American Prospect:

As our jokes and cultural products show, we can claim no ignorance. We know of the abuses, and we know of the rapes. Research by the University of South Dakota's Cindy Struckman-Johnson found that 20% of prisoners reported being coerced or pressured into sex, and 10% said they were violently raped. In a 2007 survey by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 60,000 inmates claimed to have been sexually victimized by other inmates during the previous 12 months. Given the stigma around admitting such harms, the true numbers are probably substantially higher.

But by and large, we seem to find more humor than outrage in these crimes. In part, this simply reflects the nature of our criminal justice system, which has become decreasingly rehabilitative and increasingly retributive.

And

Morally, our tacit acceptance of violence within prisons is grotesque. But it's also counterproductive. Research by economists Jesse Shapiro and Keith Chen suggests that violent prisons make prisoners more violent after they leave. When your choice is between the trauma of hardening yourself so no one will touch you or the trauma of prostituting yourself so you're protected from attack, either path leads away from rehabilitation and psychological adjustment.

And we, as a society, endure the consequences -- both because it leads ex-cons to commit more crime on the streets and because more of them end up back to jail. A recent report released by the Pew Center on the States revealed that more than one in 100 Americans is now behind bars. California alone spends $8.8 billion a year on its imprisoned population -- a 216% increase over what it paid 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.

Click here for the rest.

Right. I laugh, too. But I think the humor comes more from society's current state of gay anxiety than from actually thinking that the socially imposed violence of rape upon the incarcerated is funny. Really, as the essay observes, I think most people, including myself, simply don't think about how horrible it all is, about how we are all responsible by not insisting these horrors end.

I mean, I do think about how horrible it all is. But I'm also able to do some doublethink when laughing at these rape jokes. The point is that the jokes help to perpetuate the situation, making it all seem to be not so bad because it's funny. Like the title says, however, when you get right down to it, it's not funny. It's terrifying.

It also shows how we've hardly advanced beyond barbarity, how contemporary American society is still just as violent and hateful as our bloody past has been. It is no surprise at all that we now torture prisoners of war. It's the same social strain: we think it's just fine to sentence offenders to be raped; we think it's just fine to torture Muslims. This is about much more than a decade of Republican rule. The problem is deeply ingrained in American culture itself.

What's Obama going to do to change this? Can Obama change this?

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