The Extra Punishment Added to the Judge’s Sentence

The Bureau of Jus­tice Sta­tis­tics of the U. S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice has recently issued a sig­nif­i­cant report on Sex­ual Vic­tim­iza­tion in Pris­ons and Jails that con­firms some­thing many of us know about, many of us joke about, but is a seri­ous vio­la­tion of jus­tice in our country.

There is not a sin­gle law in any juris­dic­tion that includes sex­ual assault as a part of the sen­tence autho­rized for the judge to assign for any crime. And yet, 64,500 inmates held in state and fed­eral pris­ons on the day the study was admin­is­tered reported hav­ing been sex­u­ally abused at the facil­ity they were cur­rently held within the pre­vi­ous year. There were an addi­tional 24,000 inmates of county jails who reported the same. That is a total of 88,500 peo­ple! The sur­vey only cov­ered those peo­ple who were incar­cer­ated on the par­tic­u­lar day the sur­vey was taken. It did not cover juve­niles and oth­ers who passed through cor­rec­tion facil­i­ties for short peri­ods on time.

In 2003 Con­gress passed the Prison Rape Elim­i­na­tion Act. As a soci­ety we desire to reha­bil­i­tate peo­ple and return them to soci­ety as con­struc­tive mem­bers of soci­ety. Will this be accom­plished if rape is part of the reha­bil­i­ta­tion process?  I think our atti­tudes toward prison rape sug­gest this is all show. I think our real mass opin­ion is that we only want pun­ish­ment. We have not really pro­gressed from the crowds that gath­ered dur­ing the exe­cu­tions of the reign of Henry VIII or The Reign of Ter­ror of the French Rev­o­lu­tion. They won’t give us blood and rolling head, so we take delight from up their arses! We are sick.

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