pimplink

Best response yet: [From Plastic.com]

This pretty much boils down to two things -
Homophobia
Dehumanisation

Homophobia is what the greater portion of heterosexual, Christian middle-class lawmakers and law-abiding citizens practise. Maybe not as an active gay-bashing thing, but certainly, no one really wants to admit that men will rape men when you lock them up for years at a time in prison like animals.

Dehumanisation is what we are all guilty of. We see prison as a place for violent, inhuman psychopaths. Humans who have become untermensch by their predatory actions upon other humans. They are the pariah, the outcasts, the scum we cannot deal with. So we lock them away. It is meant to be sequestration - but punishment is what we want to give them.

What we do, all of us, is label these people as criminals. Once you are a criminal, in law and in essence, your rights evaporate. Even, it seems, basic human rights. What we would die to contemplate happening to us - anal rape - is suddenly OK, the butt of a joke (no pun intended) simply because "they are criminals" and we are not.

Its a sad state of affairs because we send people to jail for all manner of crimes. In Australia in the early 90's a guy was booked for 3 days for not paying his parking fine. Got bashed to death inside four hours. Yet we hardly raised the level of ruckus which was required by this kind of atrocity.

In the US, you sendpeople to jail easier than anywhere else in the world. Highest per capita prison population. Yet the reasons are many and varied - drug abuse, fraud, negligence, petty theft. But once these people are out of sight, they are out of mind, and they are criminals, who can be raped, bashed and forgotten about.

That's sick, in my opinion. If we send people to jail for drugs, and they are bashed and raped and come out, are they going to say as gentlemen would be expected to, "Oh sorry old chaps, did a bit of a bad spell, pip pip I'll go and trade shares."? What fucking planet are our lawmakers on, when the only rehabilitation inmates get is the abuse they weathered in jail, and the only lessons they learn is that they are an animal and no one cares?

Sure, it sounds all huggy-flower-child to think this way, but I believe that in the end, two wrongs don't make a right. Sure, your petty thief has stolen something from someone. But that's no reason to brutalise him until he turns into a sociopath with the prison-training in how to commit real crimes and the antipathy towards "the system" to do so.

__________________