Rape As a Disciplinary Tactic In US Gulags
So Kuroshin has this story about a new report saying prison rapes are now a leading vector for AIDS and Hep infection in the general populace. Sadly, it only addresses the general economic cost of organized prison rape and not the social reasons behind its widespread deployment as a disciplinary tactic within overcrowded prisons.
Sometimes I wonder how short people’s cultural retention is. This is an old, old story. It’s one of the reasons the US sided with the Axis of Evil to attempt to ban prison inspections for torture, and even Salon covered it ages ago. The Human Rights Watch have a lot to say about the organization and official compliance with Male Rape In US Prisons.
The Soviet gulags often used rape as a way to control the large population of inmates, and The Gulaging of America draws an obvious parallel with methods popular in the Soviet gulags and the astonishingly high percentage of the US population now incarcerated and subject to the same normative techniques.
Some other facts about prisons I gleaned from some prison articles:
America has the world’s largest prison population as well as the world’s highest incarceration rate, surpassing China and Russia. The U.S. has 5% of the world population, but a staggering 25% of the world’s prisoners. In 1973 one in 1,042 Americans was in prison. Today, one in every 137 Americans is behind bars.
Fourteen states forbid prisoners with felony convictions and ex-cons from voting. 1.4 million black men are currently banned from voting. In at least 8 states, one in four black men is not able to vote due to a felony conviction. 90% of New York State drug offenders behind bars are black or latino.
Since 2000 the U.S. prison population has hovered around 2 million. The proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has actually fallen during the prison boom … the enormous increase in America’s inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses.
The U.S. spends more on prisons then on foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, combined.