Americans generally take it for granted that corporal punishment, Singapore- or Saudi Arabia-style, is inhumane. We don’t just chop people’s hands off or tie them to a post and beat them. In practice, however, being sentenced to a U.S. prison in effect is a sentence to physical abuse. But rather than the level of abuse being determined by a judge and by the law, it tends to be determined by the vicissitudes of chance and gang affiliation. Read, for example, Carrie Johnson’s writeup of a recent report on sexual misconduct in federal prisons:
In what the inspector general called a “particularly egregious case,” a ring of corrections officers provided gifts to prisoners in return for sex, allowed the inmates to leave their cells and gave prison employees keys to offices so they could engage in sex with prisoners. To prevent detection, the officers allegedly intimidated prisoners to keep them from cooperating with investigators. Six of the officers were indicted in 2006, and when agents went to the prison to arrest them, one correctional officer pulled a smuggled gun and shot at random, wounding a prison lieutenant and killing inspector general agent William Sentner III.
I would add that when you’re “engag[ing] in sex” with someone who’s in prison and you’re a prison guard, you’re raping the prisoner. The prison/guard dynamic is obviously not conducive to any normal idea of consent.
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