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Until I was well into middle age, the only thought I gave to prison was the hope that I'd never see the inside of one, even as a tourist. Prisons were a distant part of life. I imagined them to be more severe versions of the Catholic elementary schools that I attended as a child; I was totally shocked the first time I heard about rape in prison. But I didn't give prisons much thought until fairly recently. I've come to see them as indications of a diseased society, not because of the inmates, but because of the social arrangements that put too Americans behind bars.
I have come to regard the incarceration of non-violent criminals as cruel and unusual. Society has no need to be protected from embezzlers or drug users. Punishing such sinners with imprisonment is vindictive, and by extension a violation of human rights.
The current New York Review of Books contains a letter that is not published among the other letters. The editors have singled it out as an important emendation of a piece about American prisons by Jason DeParle that appeared in a previous issue. Entitled "A Letter on Rape in Prisons," it is written by David Kaiser, a former NYRB staffer who is now the president of Stop Prisoner Rape. Mr Kaiser's conclusion is formidable.
Prisoner rape goes on with appalling frequency, not because it is inevitable or because we don't know how to prevent it, but because we have lacked the will and the resources to do so. And because too many people still fail to recognize that rape in detention is a violation of human rights - that, no matter what a person has done, rape should never be part of the penalty.
As the Abu Ghraib investigations and prosecutions showed, American prisons harbor sadistic jailers. Mr Kaiser reports the ghastly experience of a prior present of Stop Prisoner Rape, Tom Cahill, who
was arrested during the Vietnam War for civil disobedience. An ideologically unsympathetic jailer put him in a cell with known sexual predators, telling them that he was a child molester, and that if they "took care of him" they'd get extra rations of jello. For the next twenty-four hours Tom was gang-raped. He has never fully recovered from this.
Our prisons must be orderly places designed to socialize inmates so that, upon release, their return to civilian life is as fluid as possible. Tough guys and bullies deserve no slack on either side of the bars.
Copyright (c) 2007 Pourover Press