Comments Elsewhere

Amp:

But we won’t do it, because it would require spending precious tax dollars, and too many Americans would rather see some poor pothead or shoplifter raped than pay higher taxes.

Well. There’s a lot of reasons to condemn popular attitudes towards prison rape (a lot of people continue to think that it’s absolutely hilarious when made into a broad joke). But I don’t think that the issue has anything in particular to do with tax rates. Legislators routinely raise taxes or issue bonds, with no particular political consequence, for building more and larger prisons and have been doing so for years. (Sometimes they even manage to Mau Mau 51+% of ordinary people into signing on to it in a local referendum on, e.g., building a new county jail.)

Voters ought to take rape in prisons seriously enough to ensure that something is done about it, and it’s a sad commentary that they don’t. But the primary source of the problem isn’t voters at all; it’s corrections officers and the prison bureaucracy, who have repeatedly shown their willingness to encourage a climate of sexual violence and terror as a means of internal control—either directly or by turning a strategic blind eye—and to protect each other behind a Blue Wall when guards are negligent or are committing the assaults themselves. Power corrupts, and unaccountable power corrupts without limit.

There’s plenty of money to solve these problems already. The problem is that the legislators don’t care and the corrections officers’ unions block serious reform efforts at every step.